History as literature, and other essays
Date: 2025-02-05T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: History -- Philosophy; Speeches; addresses; etc.; American; American essays -- 20th century; Roosevelt; Theodore; 1858-1919 -- Views on history; Presidents -- United States -- Views on history; Presidents -- United States -- Intellectual life; Literature and history

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Title: History as literature, and other essays

Author: Theodore Roosevelt

Release date: February 5, 2025 [eBook #75294]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1913

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HISTORY AS LITERATURE
AND OTHER ESSAYS

HISTORY AS LITERATURE
AND OTHER ESSAYS

BY
THEODORE ROOSEVELT

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1913

Copyright, 1913, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
Published September, 1913
Reprinted in December, 1913

PREFACE

In this volume I have gathered certain addresses I made before the American Historical Association, the University of Oxford, the University of Berlin, and the Sorbonne at Paris, together with six essays I wrote for The Outlook, and one that I wrote for The Century.

In these addresses and essays I have discussed not merely literary but also historical and scientific subjects, for my thesis is that the domain of literature must be ever more widely extended over the domains of history and science. There is nothing which in this preface I can say to elaborate or emphasize what I have said on this subject in the essays themselves.

Theodore Roosevelt.

Sagamore Hill,
July 4, 1913.

CONTENTS

| PAGE
History as Literature | 1
Biological Analogies in History | 37
The World Movement | 95
Citizenship in a Republic | 135
The Thraldom of Names | 175
Productive Scholarship | 195
Dante and the Bowery | 217
The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century | 231
The Search for Truth in a Reverent Spirit | 245
The Ancient Irish Sagas | 275
An Art Exhibition | 301

⁂ Three chapters, “Biological Analogies in History,” “The World Movement,” and “Citizenship in a Republic,” were included in the volume entitled “African and European Addresses.”

HISTORY AS LITERATURE

HISTORY AS LITERATURE1

There has been much discussion as to whether history should not henceforth be treated as a branch of science rather than of literature. As with most such discussions, much of the matter in dispute has referred merely to terminology. Moreover, as regards part of the discussion, the minds of the contestants have not met, the propositions advanced by the two sides being neither mutually incompatible nor mutually relevant. There is, however, a real basis for conflict in so far as science claims exclusive possession of the field.

1 Annual address of the president of the American Historical Association delivered at Boston, December 27, 1912.

There was a time—we see it in the marvellous dawn of Hellenic life—when history was distinguished neither from poetry, from mythology, nor from the first dim beginnings of science. There was a more recent time, at the opening of Rome’s brief period of literary splendor, when poetry was accepted by a great scientific philosopher as the appropriate vehicle for teaching the lessons of science and philosophy. There was a more recent time still—the time of Holland’s leadership in arms and arts—when one of the two or three greatest world painters put his genius at the service of anatomists.

In each case the steady growth of specialization has rendered such combination now impossible. Virgil left history to Livy; and when Tacitus had become possible Lucan was a rather absurd anachronism. The elder Darwin, when he endeavored to combine the functions of scientist and poet, may have thought of Lucretius as a model; but the great Darwin was incapable of such a mistake. The surgeons of to-day would prefer the services of a good photographer to those of Rembrandt—even were those of Rembrandt available. No one would now dream of combining the history of the Trojan War with a poem on the wrath of Achilles. Beowulf’s feats against the witch who dwelt under the water would not now be mentioned in the same matter-of-fact way that a Frisian or Frankish raid is mentioned. We are long past the stage when we would accept as parts of the same epic Siegfried’s triumphs over dwarf and dragon, and even a distorted memory of the historic Hunnish king in whose feast-hall the Burgundian heroes held their last revel and made their death fight. We read of the loves of the Hound of Muirthemne and Emer the Fair without attributing to the chariot-riding heroes who “fought over the ears of their horses” and to their fierce lady-loves more than a symbolic reality. The Roland of the Norman trouvères, the Roland who blew the ivory horn at Roncesvalles, is to our minds wholly distinct from the actual Warden of the Marches who fell in a rear-guard skirmish with the Pyrenean Basques.

As regards philosophy, as distinguished from material science and from history, the specialization has been incomplete. Poetry is still used as a vehicle for the teaching of philosophy. Goethe was as profound a thinker as Kant. He has influenced the thought of mankind far more deeply than Kant because he was also a great poet. Robert Browning was a real philosopher, and his writings have had a hundredfold the circulation and the effect of those of any similar philosopher who wrote in prose, just because, and only because, what he wrote was not merely philosophy but literature. The form in which he wrote challenged attention and provoked admiration. That part of his work which some of us—which I myself, for instance—most care for is merely poetry. But in that part of his work which has exercised most attraction and has given him the widest reputation, the poetry, the form of expression, bears to the thought expressed much the same relation that the expression of Lucretius bears to the thought of Lucretius. As regards this, the great mass of his product, he is primarily a philosopher, whose writings surpass in value those of other similar philosophers precisely because they are not only philosophy but literature. In other words, Browning the philosopher is read by countless thousands to whom otherwise philosophy would be a sealed book, for exactly the same reason that Macaulay the historian is read by countless thousands to whom otherwise history would be a sealed book; because both Browning’s works and Macaulay’s works are material additions to the great sum of English literature. Philosophy is a science just as history is a science. There is need in one case as in the other for vivid and powerful presentation of scientific matter in literary form.

This does not mean that there is the like need in the two cases. History can never be truthfully presented if the presentation is purely emotional. It can never be truthfully or usefully presented unless profound research, patient, laborious, painstaking, has preceded the presentation. No amount of self-communion and of pondering on the soul of mankind, no gorgeousness of literary imagery, can take the place of cool, serious, widely extended study. The vision of the great historian must be both wide and lofty. But it must be sane, clear, and based on full knowledge of the facts and of their interrelations. Otherwise we get merely a splendid bit of serious romance-writing, like Carlyle’s “French Revolution.” Many hard-working students, alive to the deficiencies of this kind of romance-writing, have grown to distrust not only all historical writing that is romantic, but all historical writing that is vivid. They feel that complete truthfulness must never be sacrificed to color. In this they are right. They also feel that complete truthfulness is incompatible with color. In this they are wrong. The immense importance of full knowledge of a mass of dry facts and gray details has so impressed them as to make them feel that the dryness and the grayness are in themselves meritorious.

These students have rendered invaluable service to history. They are right in many of their contentions. They see how literature and science have specialized. They realize that scientific methods are as necessary to the proper study of history as to the proper study of astronomy or zoology. They know that in many, perhaps in most, of its forms, literary ability is divorced from the restrained devotion to the actual fact which is as essential to the historian as to the scientist. They know that nowadays science ostentatiously disclaims any connection with literature. They feel that if this is essential for science, it is no less essential for history.

There is much truth in all these contentions. Nevertheless, taking them all together, they do not indicate what these hard-working students believed that they indicate. Because history, science, and literature have all become specialized, the theory now is that science is definitely severed from literature and that history must follow suit. Not only do I refuse to accept this as true for history, but I do not even accept it as true for science.

Literature may be defined as that which has permanent interest because both of its substance and its form, aside from the mere technical value that inheres in a special treatise for specialists. For a great work of literature there is the same demand now that there always has been; and in any great work of literature the first element is great imaginative power. The imaginative power demanded for a great historian is different from that demanded for a great poet; but it is no less marked. Such imaginative power is in no sense incompatible with minute accuracy. On the contrary, very accurate, very real and vivid, presentation of the past can come only from one in whom the imaginative gift is strong. The industrious collector of dead facts bears to such a man precisely the relation that a photographer bears to Rembrandt. There are innumerable books, that is, innumerable volumes of printed matter between covers, which are excellent for their own purposes, but in which imagination would be as wholly out of place as in the blue prints of a sewer system or in the photographs taken to illustrate a work on comparative osteology. But the vitally necessary sewer system does not take the place of the cathedral of Rheims or of the Parthenon; no quantity of photographs will ever be equivalent to one Rembrandt; and the greatest mass of data, although indispensable to the work of a great historian, is in no shape or way a substitute for that work.

History, taught for a directly and immediately useful purpose to pupils and the teachers of pupils, is one of the necessary features of a sound education in democratic citizenship. A book containing such sound teaching, even if without any literary quality, may be as useful to the student and as creditable to the writer as a similar book on medicine. I am not slighting such a book when I say that, once it has achieved its worthy purpose, it can be permitted to lapse from human memory as a good book on medicine, which has outlived its usefulness, lapses from memory. But the historical work which does possess literary quality may be a permanent contribution to the sum of man’s wisdom, enjoyment, and inspiration. The writer of such a book must add wisdom to knowledge, and the gift of expression to the gift of imagination.

It is a shallow criticism to assert that imagination tends to inaccuracy. Only a distorted imagination tends to inaccuracy. Vast and fundamental truths can be discerned and interpreted only by one whose imagination is as lofty as the soul of a Hebrew prophet. When we say that the great historian must be a man of imagination, we use the word as we use it when we say that the great statesman must be a man of imagination. Moreover, together with imagination must go the power of expression. The great speeches of statesmen and the great writings of historians can live only if they possess the deathless quality that inheres in all great literature. The greatest literary historian must of necessity be a master of the science of history, a man who has at his finger-tips all the accumulated facts from the treasure-houses of the dead past. But he must also possess the power to marshal what is dead so that before our eyes it lives again.

Many learned people seem to feel that the quality of readableness in a book is one which warrants suspicion. Indeed, not a few learned people seem to feel that the fact that a book is interesting is proof that it is shallow. This is particularly apt to be the attitude of scientific men. Very few great scientists have written interestingly, and these few have usually felt apologetic about it. Yet sooner or later the time will come when the mighty sweep of modern scientific discovery will be placed, by scientific men with the gift of expression, at the service of intelligent and cultivated laymen. Such service will be inestimable. Another writer of “Canterbury Tales,” another singer of “Paradise Lost,” could not add more to the sum of literary achievement than the man who may picture to us the phases of the age-long history of life on this globe, or make vivid before our eyes the tremendous march of the worlds through space.

Indeed, I believe that already science has owed more than it suspects to the unconscious literary power of some of its representatives. Scientific writers of note had grasped the fact of evolution long before Darwin and Huxley; and the theories advanced by these men to explain evolution were not much more unsatisfactory, as full explanations, than the theory of natural selection itself. Yet, where their predecessors had created hardly a ripple, Darwin and Huxley succeeded in effecting a complete revolution in the thought of the age, a revolution as great as that caused by the discovery of the truth about the solar system. I believe that the chief explanation of the difference was the very simple one that what Darwin and Huxley wrote was interesting to read. Every cultivated man soon had their volumes in his library, and they still keep their places on our book-shelves. But Lamarck and Cope are only to be found in the libraries of a few special students. If they had possessed a gift of expression akin to Darwin’s, the doctrine of evolution would not in the popular mind have been confounded with the doctrine of natural selection and a juster estimate than at present would obtain as to the relative merits of the explanations of evolution championed by the different scientific schools.

Do not misunderstand me. In the field of historical research an immense amount can be done by men who have no literary power whatever. Moreover, the most painstaking and laborious research, covering long periods of years, is necessary in order to accumulate the material for any history worth writing at all. There are important by-paths of history, moreover, which hardly admit of treatment that would make them of interest to any but specialists. All this I fully admit. In particular I pay high honor to the patient and truthful investigator. He does an indispensable work. My claim is merely that such work should not exclude the work of the great master who can use the materials gathered, who has the gift of vision, the quality of the seer, the power himself to see what has happened and to make what he has seen clear to the vision of others. My only protest is against those who believe that the extension of the activities of the most competent mason and most energetic contractor will supply the lack of great architects. If, as in the Middle Ages, the journeymen builders are themselves artists, why this is the best possible solution of the problem. But if they are not artists, then their work, however much it represents of praiseworthy industry, and of positive usefulness, does not take the place of the work of a great artist.

Take a concrete example. It is only of recent years that the importance of inscriptions has been realized. To the present-day scholar they are invaluable. Even to the layman, some of them turn the past into the present with startling clearness. The least imaginative is moved by the simple inscription on the Etruscan sarcophagus: “I, the great lady”; a lady so haughty that no other human being was allowed to rest near her; and yet now nothing remains but this proof of the pride of the nameless one. Or the inscription in which Queen Hatshepsu recounts her feats and her magnificence, and ends by adjuring the onlooker, when overcome by the recital, not to say “how wonderful” but “how like her!”—could any picture of a living queen be more intimately vivid? With such inscriptions before us the wonder is that it took us so long to realize their worth. Not unnaturally this realization, when it did come, was followed by the belief that inscriptions would enable us to dispense with the great historians of antiquity. This error is worse than the former. Where the inscriptions give us light on what would otherwise be darkness, we must be profoundly grateful; but we must not confound the lesser light with the greater. We could better afford to lose every Greek inscription that has ever been found than the chapter in which Thucydides tells of the Athenian failure before Syracuse. Indeed, few inscriptions teach us as much history as certain forms of literature that do not consciously aim at teaching history at all. The inscriptions of Hellenistic Greece in the third century before our era do not, all told, give us so lifelike a view of the ordinary life of the ordinary men and women who dwelt in the great Hellenistic cities of the time, as does the fifteenth idyl of Theocritus.

This does not mean that good history can be unscientific. So far from ignoring science, the great historian of the future can do nothing unless he is steeped in science. He can never equal what has been done by the great historians of the past unless he writes not merely with full knowledge, but with an intensely vivid consciousness, of all that of which they were necessarily ignorant. He must accept what we now know to be man’s place in nature. He must realize that man has been on this earth for a period of such incalculable length that, from the standpoint of the student of his development through time, what our ancestors used to call “antiquity” is almost indistinguishable from the present day. If our conception of history takes in the beast-like man whose sole tool and weapon was the stone fist-hatchet, and his advanced successors, the man who etched on bone pictures of the mammoth, the reindeer, and the wild horse, in what is now France, and the man who painted pictures of bison in the burial caves of what is now Spain; if we also conceive in their true position our “contemporaneous ancestors,” the savages who are now no more advanced than the cave-dwellers of a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand years back, then we shall accept Thothmes and Cæsar, Alfred and Washington, Timoleon and Lincoln, Homer and Shakespeare, Pythagoras and Emerson, as all nearly contemporaneous in time and in culture.

The great historian of the future will have easy access to innumerable facts patiently gathered by tens of thousands of investigators, whereas the great historian of the past had very few facts, and often had to gather most of these himself. The great historian of the future can not be excused if he fails to draw on the vast storehouses of knowledge that have been accumulated, if he fails to profit by the wisdom and work of other men, which are now the common property of all intelligent men. He must use the instruments which the historians of the past did not have ready to hand. Yet even with these instruments he can not do as good work as the best of the elder historians unless he has vision and imagination, the power to grasp what is essential and to reject the infinitely more numerous non-essentials, the power to embody ghosts, to put flesh and blood on dry bones, to make dead men living before our eyes. In short, he must have the power to take the science of history and turn it into literature.

Those who wish history to be treated as a purely utilitarian science often decry the recital of the mighty deeds of the past, the deeds which always have aroused, and for a long period to come are likely to arouse, most interest. These men say that we should study not the unusual but the usual. They say that we profit most by laborious research into the drab monotony of the ordinary, rather than by fixing our eyes on the purple patches that break it. Beyond all question the great historian of the future must keep ever in mind the relative importance of the usual and the unusual. If he is a really great historian, if he possesses the highest imaginative and literary quality, he will be able to interest us in the gray tints of the general landscape no less than in the flame hues of the jutting peaks. It is even more essential to have such quality in writing of the commonplace than in writing of the exceptional. Otherwise no profit will come from study of the ordinary; for writings are useless unless they are read, and they can not be read unless they are readable. Furthermore, while doing full justice to the importance of the usual, of the commonplace, the great historian will not lose sight of the importance of the heroic.

It is hard to tell just what it is that is most important to know. The wisdom of one generation may seem the folly of the next. This is just as true of the wisdom of the dry-as-dusts as of the wisdom of those who write interestingly. Moreover, while the value of the by-products of knowledge does not readily yield itself to quantitative expression, it is none the less real. A utilitarian education should undoubtedly be the foundation of all education. But it is far from advisable, it is far from wise, to have it the end of all education. Technical training will more and more be accepted as the prime factor in our educational system, a factor as essential for the farmer, the blacksmith, the seamstress, and the cook, as for the lawyer, the doctor, the engineer, and the stenographer. For similar reasons the purely practical and technical lessons of history, the lessons that help us to grapple with our immediate social and industrial problems, will also receive greater emphasis than ever before. But if we are wise we will no more permit this practical training to exclude knowledge of that part of literature which is history than of that part of literature which is poetry. Side by side with the need for the perfection of the individual in the technic of his special calling goes the need of broad human sympathy, and the need of lofty and generous emotion in that individual. Only thus can the citizenship of the modern state rise level to the complex modern social needs.

No technical training, no narrowly utilitarian study of any kind will meet this second class of needs. In part they can best be met by a training that will fit men and women to appreciate, and therefore to profit by, great poetry and those great expressions of the historian and the statesman which rivet our interest and stir our souls. Great thoughts match and inspire heroic deeds. The same reasons that make the Gettysburg speech and the Second Inaugural impress themselves on men’s minds far more deeply than technical treatises on the constitutional justification of slavery or of secession, apply to fitting descriptions of the great battle and the great contest which occasioned the two speeches. The tense epic of the Gettysburg fight, the larger epic of the whole Civil War, when truthfully and vividly portrayed, will always have, and ought always to have, an attraction, an interest, that can not be roused by the description of the same number of hours or years of ordinary existence. There are supreme moments in which intensity and not duration is the all-important element. History which is not professedly utilitarian, history which is didactic only as great poetry is unconsciously didactic, may yet possess that highest form of usefulness, the power to thrill the souls of men with stories of strength and craft and daring, and to lift them out of their common selves to the heights of high endeavor.

The greatest historian should also be a great moralist. It is no proof of impartiality to treat wickedness and goodness as on the same level. But of course the obsession of purposeful moral teaching may utterly defeat its own aim. Moreover, unfortunately, the avowed teacher of morality, when he writes history, sometimes goes very far wrong indeed. It often happens that the man who can be of real help in inspiring others by his utterances on abstract principles is wholly unable to apply his own principles to concrete cases. Carlyle offers an instance in point. Very few men have ever been a greater source of inspiration to other ardent souls than was Carlyle when he confined himself to preaching morality in the abstract. Moreover, his theory bade him treat history as offering material to support that theory. But not only was he utterly unable to distinguish either great virtues or great vices when he looked abroad on contemporary life—as witness his attitude toward our own Civil War—but he was utterly unable to apply his own principles concretely in history. His “Frederick the Great” is literature of a high order. It may, with reservations, even be accepted as history. But the “morality” therein jubilantly upheld is shocking to any man who takes seriously Carlyle’s other writings in which he lays down principles of conduct. In his “Frederick the Great” he was not content to tell the facts. He was not content to announce his admiration. He wished to square himself with his theories, and to reconcile what he admired, both with the actual fact and with his previously expressed convictions on morality. He could only do so by refusing to face the facts and by using words with meanings that shifted to meet his own mental emergencies. He pretended to discern morality where no vestige of it existed. He tortured the facts to support his views. The “morality” he praised had no connection with morality as understood in the New Testament. It was the kind of archaic morality observed by the Danites in their dealings with the people of Laish. The sermon of the Mormon bishop in Owen Wister’s “Pilgrim on the Gila” sets forth the only moral lessons which it was possible for Carlyle truthfully to draw from the successes he described.

History must not be treated as something set off by itself. It should not be treated as a branch of learning bound to the past by the shackles of an iron conservatism. It is neither necessary rigidly to mark the limits of the province of history, nor to treat of all that is within that province, nor to exclude any subject within that province from treatment, nor yet to treat different methods of dealing with the same subject as mutually exclusive. Every writer and every reader has his own needs, to meet himself or to be met by others. Among a great multitude of thoughtful people there is room for the widest possible variety of appeals. Let each man fearlessly choose what is of real importance and interest to him personally, reverencing authority, but not in a superstitious spirit, because he must needs reverence liberty even more.

There is an infinite variety of subjects to treat, and no need to estimate their relative importance. Because one man is interested in the history of finance, it does not mean that another is wrong in being interested in the history of war. One man’s need is met by exhaustive tables of statistics; another’s by the study of the influence exerted on national life by the great orators, the Websters and Burkes, or by the poets, the Tyrtæuses and Körners, who in crises utter what is in the nation’s heart. There is need of the study of the historical workings of representative government. There is no less need of the study of the economic changes produced by the factory system. Because we study with profit what Thorold Rogers wrote of prices we are not debarred from also profiting by Mahan’s studies of naval strategy. One man finds what is of most importance to his own mind and heart in tracing the effect upon humanity of the spread of malaria along the shores of the Ægean; or the effect of the Black Death on the labor-market of mediæval Europe; or the profound influence upon the development of the African continent of the fatal diseases borne by the bites of insects, which close some districts to human life and others to the beasts without which humanity rests at the lowest stage of savagery. One man sees the events from one view-point, one from another. Yet another can combine both. We can be stirred by Thayer’s study of Cavour without abating our pleasure in the younger Trevelyan’s volumes on Garibaldi. Because we revel in Froissart, or Joinville, or Villehardouin, there is no need that we should lack interest in the books that attempt the more difficult task of tracing the economic changes in the status of peasant, mechanic, and burgher during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

History must welcome the entrance upon its domain of every science. As James Harvey Robinson in his “New History” has said:

“The bounds of all departments of human research and speculation are inherently provisional, indefinite, and fluctuating; moreover, the lines of demarcation are hopelessly interlaced, for real men and the real universe in which they live are so intricate as to defy all attempts even of the most patient and subtle German to establish satisfactorily and permanently the Begriff und Wesen of any artificially delimited set of natural phenomena, whether words, thoughts, deeds, forces, animals, plants, or stars. Each so-called science or discipline is ever and always dependent on other sciences and disciplines. It draws its life from them, and to them it owes, consciously or unconsciously, a great part of its chances of progress.”

Elsewhere this writer dwells on the need of understanding the genetic side of history, if we are to grasp the real meaning of, and grapple most effectively with, the phenomena of our present-day lives; for that which is can be dealt with best if we realize at least in part from what a tangled web of causation it has sprung.

The work of the archæologist, the work of the anthropologist, the work of the palæo-ethnologist—out of all these a great literary historian may gather material indispensable for his use. He, and we, ought fully to acknowledge our debt to the collectors of these indispensable facts. The investigator in any line may do work which puts us all under lasting obligations to him, even though he be totally deficient in the art of literary expression, that is, totally deficient in the ability to convey vivid and lifelike pictures to others of the past whose secrets he has laid bare. I would give no scanty or grudging acknowledgment to the deeds of such a man. He does a lasting service; whereas the man who tries to make literary expression cover his ignorance or misreading of facts renders less than no service. But the service done is immeasurably increased in value when the man arises who from his study of a myriad dead fragments is able to paint some living picture of the past.

This is why the record as great writers preserve it has a value immeasurably beyond what is merely lifeless. Such a record pulses with immortal life. It may recount the deed or the thought of a hero at some supreme moment. It may be merely the portrayal of homely every-day life. This matters not, so long as in either event the genius of the historian enables him to paint in colors that do not fade. The cry of the Ten Thousand when they first saw the sea still stirs the hearts of men. The ruthless death scene between Jehu and Jezebel; wicked Ahab, smitten by the chance arrow, and propped in his chariot until he died at sundown; Josiah, losing his life because he would not heed the Pharaoh’s solemn warning, and mourned by all the singing men and all the singing women—the fates of these kings and of this king’s daughter, are part of the common stock of knowledge of mankind. They were petty rulers of petty principalities; yet, compared with them, mighty conquerors, who added empire to empire, Shalmaneser and Sargon, Amenhotep and Rameses, are but shadows; for the deeds and the deaths of the kings of Judah and Israel are written in words that, once read, can not be forgotten. The Peloponnesian War bulks of unreal size to-day because it once seemed thus to bulk to a master mind. Only a great historian can fittingly deal with a very great subject; yet because the qualities of chief interest in human history can be shown on a small field no less than on a large one, some of the greatest historians have treated subjects that only their own genius rendered great.

So true is this that if great events lack a great historian, and a great poet writes about them, it is the poet who fixes them in the mind of mankind, so that in after-time importance the real has become the shadow and the shadow the reality. Shakespeare has definitely fixed the character of the Richard III of whom ordinary men think and speak. Keats forgot even the right name of the man who first saw the Pacific Ocean; yet it is his lines which leap to our minds when we think of the “wild surmise” felt by the indomitable explorer-conqueror from Spain when the vast new sea burst on his vision.

When, however, the great historian has spoken, his work will never be undone. No poet can ever supersede what Napier wrote of the storming of Badajoz, of the British infantry at Albuera, and of the light artillery at Fuentes d’Oñoro. After Parkman had written of Montcalm and Wolfe there was left for other writers only what Fitzgerald left for other translators of Omar Khayyam. Much new light has been thrown on the history of the Byzantine Empire by the many men who have studied it of recent years; we read each new writer with pleasure and profit; and after reading each we take down a volume of Gibbon, with renewed thankfulness that a great writer was moved to do a great task.

The greatest of future archæologists will be the great historian who instead of being a mere antiquarian delver in dust-heaps has the genius to reconstruct for us the immense panorama of the past. He must possess knowledge. He must possess that without which knowledge is of so little use, wisdom. What he brings from the charnel-house he must use with such potent wizardry that we shall see the life that was and not the death that is. For remember that the past was life just as much as the present is life. Whether it be Egypt, or Mesopotamia, or Scandinavia with which he deals, the great historian, if the facts permit him, will put before us the men and women as they actually lived so that we shall recognize them for what they were, living beings. Men like Maspero, Breasted, and Weigall have already begun this work for the countries of the Nile and the Euphrates. For Scandinavia the groundwork was laid long ago in the “Heimskringla” and in such sagas as those of Burnt Njal and Gisli Soursop. Minute descriptions of mummies and of the furniture of tombs help us as little to understand the Egypt of the mighty days, as to sit inside the tomb of Mount Vernon would help us to see Washington the soldier leading to battle his scarred and tattered veterans, or Washington the statesman, by his serene strength of character, rendering it possible for his countrymen to establish themselves as one great nation.

The great historian must be able to paint for us the life of the plain people, the ordinary men and women, of the time of which he writes. He can do this only if he possesses the highest kind of imagination. Collections of figures no more give us a picture of the past than the reading of a tariff report on hides or woollens gives us an idea of the actual lives of the men and women who live on ranches or work in factories. The great historian will in as full measure as possible present to us the every-day life of the men and women of the age which he describes. Nothing that tells of this life will come amiss to him. The instruments of their labor and the weapons of their warfare, the wills that they wrote, the bargains that they made, and the songs that they sang when they feasted and made love: he must use them all. He must tell us of the toil of the ordinary man in ordinary times, and of the play by which that ordinary toil was broken. He must never forget that no event stands out entirely isolated. He must trace from its obscure and humble beginnings each of the movements that in its hour of triumph has shaken the world.

Yet he must not forget that the times that are extraordinary need especial portrayal. In the revolt against the old tendency of historians to deal exclusively with the spectacular and the exceptional, to treat only of war and oratory and government, many modern writers have gone to the opposite extreme. They fail to realize that in the lives of nations as in the lives of men there are hours so fraught with weighty achievement, with triumph or defeat, with joy or sorrow, that each such hour may determine all the years that are to come thereafter, or may outweigh all the years that have gone before. In the writings of our historians, as in the lives of our ordinary citizens, we can neither afford to forget that it is the ordinary every-day life which counts most; nor yet that seasons come when ordinary qualities count for but little in the face of great contending forces of good and of evil, the outcome of whose strife determines whether the nation shall walk in the glory of the morning or in the gloom of spiritual death.

The historian must deal with the days of common things, and deal with them so that they shall interest us in reading of them as our own common things interest us as we live among them. He must trace the changes that come almost unseen, the slow and gradual growth that transforms for good or for evil the children and grandchildren so that they stand high above or far below the level on which their forefathers stood. He must also trace the great cataclysms that interrupt and divert this gradual development. He can no more afford to be blind to one class of phenomena than to the other. He must ever remember that while the worst offence of which he can be guilty is to write vividly and inaccurately, yet that unless he writes vividly he can not write truthfully; for no amount of dull, painstaking detail will sum up as the whole truth unless the genius is there to paint the truth.

There can be no better illustration of what I mean than is afforded by the history of Russia during the last thousand years. The historian must trace the growth of the earliest Slav communities of the forest and the steppe, the infiltration of Scandinavian invaders who gave them their first power of mass action, and the slow, chaotic development of the little communes into barbarous cities and savage princedoms. In later Russian history he must show us priest and noble, merchant and serf, changing slowly from the days when Ivan the Terrible warred against Bátory, the Magyar king of Poland, until the present moment, when with half-suspicious eyes the people of the Czar watch their remote Bulgarian kinsmen standing before the last European stronghold of the Turk. During all these centuries there were multitudes of wars, foreign and domestic, any or all of which were of little moment compared to the slow working of the various forces that wrought in the times of peace. But there was one period of storm and overthrow so terrible that it affected profoundly for all time the whole growth of the Russian people, in inmost character no less than in external dominion. Early in the thirteenth century the genius of Jenghiz Khan stirred the Mongol horsemen of the mid-Asian pastures to a movement as terrible to civilization as the lava flow of a volcano to the lands around the volcano’s foot. When that century opened, the Mongols were of no more weight in the world than the Touaregs of the Sahara are to-day. Long before the century had closed they had ridden from the Yellow Sea to the Adriatic and the Persian Gulf. They had crushed Christian and Moslem and Buddhist alike beneath the iron cruelty of their sway. They had conquered China as their successors conquered India. They sacked Baghdad, the seat of the Caliph. In mid-Europe their presence for a moment caused the same horror to fall on the warring adherents of the Pope and the Kaiser. To Europe they were a scourge so frightful, so irresistible, that the people cowered before them as if they had been demons. No European army of that day, of any nation, was able to look them in the face on a stricken field. Bestial in their lives, irresistible in battle, merciless in victory, they trampled the lands over which they rode into bloody mire beneath the hoofs of their horses. The squat, slit-eyed, brawny horse-bowmen drew a red furrow across Hungary, devastated Poland, and in Silesia overthrew the banded chivalry of Germany. But it was in Russia that they did their worst. They not merely conquered Russia, but held the Russians as cowering and abject serfs for two centuries. Every feeble effort at resistance was visited with such bloodthirsty vengeance that finally no Russian ventured ever to oppose them at all. But the princes of the cities soon found that the beast-like fury of the conquerors when their own desires were thwarted, was only equalled by their beast-like indifference to all that was done among the conquered people themselves, and that they were ever ready to hire themselves out to aid each Russian against his brother. Under this régime the Russian who rose was the Russian who with cringing servility to his Tartar overlords combined ferocious and conscienceless greed in the treatment of his fellow Russians. Moscow came to the front by using the Tartar to help conquer the other Russian cities, paying as a price abject obedience to all Tartar demands. In the long run the fierce and pliant cunning of the conquered people proved too much for the short-sighted and arrogant brutality of the conquerors. The Tartar power, the Mongolian power, waned. Russia became united, threw off the yoke, and herself began a career of aggression at the expense of her former conquerors. But the reconquest of racial independence, vitally necessary though it was to Russia, had been paid for by the establishment of a despotism Asiatic rather than European in its spirit and working.

The true historian will bring the past before our eyes as if it were the present. He will make us see as living men the hard-faced archers of Agincourt, and the war-worn spearmen who followed Alexander down beyond the rim of the known world. We shall hear grate on the coast of Britain the keels of the Low-Dutch sea-thieves whose children’s children were to inherit unknown continents. We shall thrill to the triumphs of Hannibal. Gorgeous in our sight will rise the splendor of dead cities, and the might of the elder empires of which the very ruins crumbled to dust ages ago. Along ancient trade-routes, across the world’s waste spaces, the caravans shall move; and the admirals of uncharted seas shall furrow the oceans with their lonely prows. Beyond the dim centuries we shall see the banners float above armed hosts. We shall see conquerors riding forward to victories that have changed the course of time. We shall listen to the prophecies of forgotten seers. Ours shall be the dreams of dreamers who dreamed greatly, who saw in their vision peaks so lofty that never yet have they been reached by the sons and daughters of men. Dead poets shall sing to us the deeds of men of might and the love and the beauty of women. We shall see the dancing girls of Memphis. The scent of the flowers in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon will be heavy to our senses. We shall sit at feast with the kings of Nineveh when they drink from ivory and gold. With Queen Maeve in her sun-parlor we shall watch the nearing chariots of the champions. For us the war-horns of King Olaf shall wail across the flood, and the harps sound high at festivals in forgotten halls. The frowning strongholds of the barons of old shall rise before us, and the white palace-castles from whose windows Syrian princes once looked across the blue Ægean. We shall know the valor of the two-sworded Samurai. Ours shall be the hoary wisdom and the strange, crooked folly of the immemorial civilizations which tottered to a living death in India and in China. We shall see the terrible horsemen of Timur the Lame ride over the roof of the world; we shall hear the drums beat as the armies of Gustavus and Frederick and Napoleon drive forward to victory. Ours shall be the woe of burgher and peasant, and ours the stern joy when freemen triumph and justice comes to her own. The agony of the galley-slaves shall be ours, and the rejoicing when the wicked are brought low and the men of evil days have their reward. We shall see the glory of triumphant violence, and the revel of those who do wrong in high places; and the broken-hearted despair that lies beneath the glory and the revel. We shall also see the supreme righteousness of the wars for freedom and justice, and know that the men who fell in these wars made all mankind their debtors.

Some day the historians will tell us of these things. Some day, too, they will tell our children of the age and the land in which we now live. They will portray the conquest of the continent. They will show the slow beginnings of settlement, the growth of the fishing and trading towns on the seacoast, the hesitating early ventures into the Indian-haunted forest. Then they will show the backwoodsmen, with their long rifles and their light axes, making their way with labor and peril through the wooded wilderness to the Mississippi; and then the endless march of the white-topped wagon-trains across plain and mountain to the coast of the greatest of the five great oceans. They will show how the land which the pioneers won slowly and with incredible hardship was filled in two generations by the overflow from the countries of western and central Europe. The portentous growth of the cities will be shown, and the change from a nation of farmers to a nation of business men and artisans, and all the far-reaching consequences of the rise of the new industrialism. The formation of a new ethnic type in this melting-pot of the nations will be told. The hard materialism of our age will appear, and also the strange capacity for lofty idealism which must be reckoned with by all who would understand the American character. A people whose heroes are Washington and Lincoln, a peaceful people who fought to a finish one of the bloodiest of wars, waged solely for the sake of a great principle and a noble idea, surely possess an emergency-standard far above mere money-getting.

Those who tell the Americans of the future what the Americans of to-day and of yesterday have done, will perforce tell much that is unpleasant. This is but saying that they will describe the arch-typical civilization of this age. Nevertheless, when the tale is finally told, I believe that it will show that the forces working for good in our national life outweigh the forces working for evil, and that, with many blunders and shortcomings, with much halting and turning aside from the path, we shall yet in the end prove our faith by our works, and show in our lives our belief that righteousness exalteth a nation.

BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES IN HISTORY

BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES IN HISTORY2

An American who, in response to such an invitation as I have received, speaks in this university of ancient renown, can not but feel with peculiar vividness the interest and charm of his surroundings, fraught as they are with a thousand associations. Your great universities, and all the memories that make them great, are living realities in the minds of scores of thousands of men who have never seen them and who dwell across the seas in other lands. Moreover, these associations are no stronger in the men of English stock than in those who are not. My people have been for eight generations in America; but in one thing I am like the Americans of to-morrow, rather than like many of the Americans of to-day; for I have in my veins the blood of men who came from many different European races. The ethnic make-up of our people is slowly changing, so that constantly the race tends to become more and more akin to that of those Americans who like myself are of the old stock but not mainly of English stock. Yet I think that, as time goes by, mutual respect, understanding, and sympathy among the English-speaking peoples grow greater and not less. Any of my ancestors, Hollander or Huguenot, Scotchman or Irishman, who had come to Oxford in “the spacious days of great Elizabeth,” would have felt far more alien than I, their descendant, now feel. Common heirship in the things of the spirit makes a closer bond than common heirship in the things of the body.

2 Delivered at Oxford, June 7, 1910. This was the Romanes Lecture for 1910, and has been published by the Oxford University Press, with whose permission it is included in this volume.

More than ever before in the world’s history we of to-day seek to penetrate the causes of the mysteries that surround not only mankind but all life, both in the present and the past. We search, we peer, we see things dimly; here and there we get a ray of clear vision, as we look before and after. We study the tremendous procession of the ages, from the immemorial past when in “cramp elf and saurian forms” the creative forces “swathed their too-much power,” down to the yesterday, a few score thousand years distant only, when the history of man became the overwhelming fact in the history of life on this planet; and studying we see strange analogies in the phenomena of life and death, of birth, growth, and change, between those physical groups of animal life which we designate as species, forms, races, and the highly complex and composite entities which rise before our minds when we speak of nations and civilizations.

It is this study which has given science its present-day prominence. In the world of intellect, doubtless, the most marked features in the history of the past century have been the extraordinary advances in scientific knowledge and investigation, and in the position held by the men of science with reference to those engaged in other pursuits. I am not now speaking of applied science; of the science, for instance, which, having revolutionized transportation on the earth and the water, is now on the brink of carrying it into the air; of the science that finds its expression in such extraordinary achievements as the telephone and the telegraph; of the sciences which have so accelerated the velocity of movement in social and industrial conditions—for the changes in the mechanical appliances of ordinary life during the last three generations have been greater than in all the preceding generations since history dawned. I speak of the science which has no more direct bearing upon the affairs of our every-day life than literature or music, painting or sculpture, poetry or history. A hundred years ago the ordinary man of cultivation had to know something of these last subjects; but the probabilities were rather against his having any but the most superficial scientific knowledge. At present all this has changed, thanks to the interest taken in scientific discoveries, the large circulation of scientific books, and the rapidity with which ideas originating among students of the most advanced and abstruse sciences become, at least partially, domiciled in the popular mind.

Another feature of the change, of the growth in the position of science in the eyes of every one, and of the greatly increased respect naturally resulting for scientific methods, has been a certain tendency for scientific students to encroach on other fields. This is particularly true of the field of historical study. Not only have scientific men insisted upon the necessity of considering the history of man, especially in its early stages, in connection with what biology shows to be the history of life, but furthermore there has arisen a demand that history shall itself be treated as a science. Both positions are in their essence right; but as regards each position, the more arrogant among the invaders of the new realm of knowledge take an attitude to which it is not necessary to assent. As regards the latter of the two positions, that which would treat history henceforth merely as one branch of scientific study, we must of course cordially agree that accuracy in recording facts and appreciation of their relative worth and interrelationship are just as necessary in historical study as in any other kind of study. The fact that a book, though interesting, is untrue, of course removes it at once from the category of history, however much it may still deserve to retain a place in the always desirable group of volumes which deal with entertaining fiction. But the converse also holds, at least to the extent of permitting us to insist upon what would seem to be the elementary fact that a book which is written to be read should be readable. This rather obvious truth seems to have been forgotten by some of the more zealous scientific historians, who apparently hold that the worth of a historical book is directly in proportion to the impossibility of reading it, save as a painful duty. Now I am willing that history shall be treated as a branch of science, but only on condition that it also remains a branch of literature; and, furthermore, I believe that as the field of science encroaches on the field of literature there should be a corresponding encroachment of literature upon science; and I hold that one of the great needs, which can only be met by very able men whose culture is broad enough to include literature as well as science, is the need of books for scientific laymen. We need a literature of science which shall be readable. So far from doing away with the school of great historians, the school of Polybius and Tacitus, Gibbon and Macaulay, we need merely that the future writers of history, without losing the qualities which have made these men great, shall also utilize the new facts and new methods which science has put at their disposal. Dryness is not in itself a measure of value. No “scientific” treatise about St. Louis will displace Joinville, for the very reason that Joinville’s place is in both history and literature; no minute study of the Napoleonic wars will teach us more than Marbot—and Marbot is as interesting as Walter Scott. Moreover, certain at least of the branches of science should likewise be treated by masters in the art of presentment, so that the layman interested in science, no less than the layman interested in history, shall have on his shelves classics which can be read. Whether this wish be or be not capable of realization, it assuredly remains true that the great historian of the future must essentially represent the ideal striven after by the great historians of the past. The industrious collector of facts occupies an honorable, but not an exalted, position, and the scientific historian who produces books which are not literature must rest content with the honor, substantial, but not of the highest type, that belongs to him who gathers material which some time some great master shall arise to use.

Yet, while freely conceding all that can be said of the masters of literature, we must insist upon the historian of mankind working in the scientific spirit, and using the treasure-houses of science. He who would fully treat of man must know at least something of biology, of the science that treats of living, breathing things; and especially of that science of evolution which is inseparably connected with the great name of Darwin. Of course, there is no exact parallelism between the birth, growth, and death of species in the animal world, and the birth, growth, and death of societies in the world of man. Yet there is a certain parallelism. There are strange analogies; it may be that there are homologies.

How far the resemblances between the two sets of phenomena are more than accidental, how far biology can be used as an aid in the interpretation of human history, we can not at present say. The historian should never forget, what the highest type of scientific man is always teaching us to remember, that willingness to admit ignorance is a prime factor in developing wisdom out of knowledge. Wisdom is advanced by research which enables us to add to knowledge; and, moreover, the way for wisdom is made ready when men who record facts of vast but unknown import, if asked to explain their full significance, are willing frankly to answer that they do not know. The research which enables us to add to the sum of complete knowledge stands first; but second only stands the research which, while enabling us clearly to pose the problem, also requires us to say that with our present knowledge we can offer no complete solution.

Let me illustrate what I mean by an instance or two taken from one of the most fascinating branches of world-history, the history of the higher forms of life, of mammalian life, on this globe.

Geologists and astronomers are not agreed as to the length of time necessary for the changes that have taken place. At any rate, many hundreds of thousands of years, some millions of years, have passed by since in the eocene, at the beginning of the tertiary period, we find the traces of an abundant, varied, and highly developed mammalian life on the land masses out of which have grown the continents as we see them to-day. The ages swept by, until, with the advent of man substantially in the physical shape in which we now know him, we also find a mammalian fauna not essentially different in kind, though widely differing in distribution, from that of the present day. Throughout this immense period form succeeds form, type succeeds type, in obedience to laws of evolution, of progress and retrogression, of development and death, which we as yet understand only in the most imperfect manner. As knowledge increases our wisdom is often turned into foolishness, and many of the phenomena of evolution which seemed clearly explicable to the learned master of science who founded these lectures, to us nowadays seem far less satisfactorily explained. The scientific men of most note now differ widely in their estimates of the relative parts played in evolution by natural selection, by mutation, by the inheritance of acquired characteristics; and we study their writings with a growing impression that there are forces at work which our blinded eyes wholly fail to apprehend; and where this is the case the part of wisdom is to say that we believe we have such and such partial explanations, but that we are not warranted in saying that we have the whole explanation. In tracing the history of the development of faunal life during this period, the age of mammals, there are some facts which are clearly established, some great and sweeping changes for which we can with certainty ascribe reasons. There are other facts as to which we grope in the dark, and vast changes, vast catastrophes, of which we can give no adequate explanation.

Before illustrating these types, let us settle one or two matters of terminology. In the changes, the development and extinction, of species we must remember that such expressions as “a new species,” or as “a species becoming extinct,” are each commonly and indiscriminately used to express totally different and opposite meanings. Of course the “new” species is not new in the sense that its ancestors appeared later on the globe’s surface than those of any old species tottering to extinction. Phylogenetically, each animal now living must necessarily trace its ancestral descent back through countless generations, through eons of time, to the early stages of the appearance of life on the globe. All that we mean by a “new” species is that from some cause, or set of causes, one of these ancestral stems slowly or suddenly develops into a form unlike any that has preceded it; so that, while in one form of life the ancestral type is continuously repeated and the old species continues to exist, in another form of life there is a deviation from the ancestral type and a new species appears.

Similarly, “extinction of species” is a term which has two entirely different meanings. The type may become extinct by dying out and leaving no descendants. Or it may die out because as the generations go by there is change, slow or swift, until a new form is produced. Thus in one case the line of life comes to an end. In the other case it changes into something different. The huge titanothere, and the small three-toed horse, both existed at what may roughly be called the same period of the world’s history, back in the middle of the mammalian age. Both are extinct in the sense that each has completely disappeared and that nothing like either is to be found in the world to-day. But whereas all the individual titanotheres finally died out, leaving no descendants, a number of the three-toed horses did leave descendants, and these descendants, constantly changing as the ages went by, finally developed into the highly specialized one-toed horses, asses, and zebras of to-day.

The analogy between the facts thus indicated and certain facts in the development of human societies is striking. A further analogy is supplied by a very curious tendency often visible in cases of intense and extreme specialization. When an animal form becomes highly specialized, the type at first, because of its specialization, triumphs over its allied rivals and its enemies, and attains a great development; until in many cases the specialization becomes so extreme that from some cause unknown to us, or at which we merely guess, it disappears. The new species which mark a new era commonly come from the less specialized types, the less distinctive, dominant, and striking types, of the preceding era.

When dealing with the changes, cataclysmic or gradual, which divide one period of paleontological history from another, we can sometimes assign causes, and again we can not even guess at them. In the case of single species, or of faunas of very restricted localities, the explanation is often self-evident. A comparatively slight change in the amount of moisture in the climate, with the attendant change in vegetation, might readily mean the destruction of a group of huge herbivores with a bodily size such that they needed a vast quantity of food, and with teeth so weak or so peculiar that but one or two kinds of plants could furnish this food. Again, we now know that the most deadly foes of the higher forms of life are various lower forms of life, such as insects, or microscopic creatures conveyed into the blood by insects. There are districts in South America where many large animals, wild and domestic, can not live because of the presence either of certain ticks or of certain baleful flies. In Africa there is a terrible genus of poison fly, each species acting as the host of microscopic creatures which are deadly to certain of the higher vertebrates. One of these species, though harmless to man, is fatal to all domestic animals, and this although harmless to the closely related wild kinsfolk of these animals. Another is fatal to man himself, being the cause of the “sleeping-sickness” which in many large districts has killed out the entire population. Of course the development or the extension of the range of any such insects, and any one of many other causes which we see actually at work around us, would readily account for the destruction of some given species or even for the destruction of several species in a limited area of country.

When whole faunal groups die out over large areas, the question is different, and may or may not be susceptible of explanation with the knowledge we actually possess. In the old arctogæal continent, for instance, in what is now Europe, Asia, and North America, the glacial period made a complete, but of course explicable, change in the faunal life of the region. At one time the continent held a rich and varied fauna. Then a period of great cold supervened, and a different fauna succeeded the first. The explanation of the change is obvious.

But in many other cases we can not so much as hazard a guess at why a given change occurred. One of the most striking instances of these inexplicable changes is that afforded by the history of South America toward the close of the tertiary period. For ages South America had been an island by itself, cut off from North America at the very time that the latter was at least occasionally in land communication with Asia. During this time a very peculiar fauna grew up in South America, some of the types resembling nothing now existing, while others are recognizable as ancestral forms of the ant-eaters, sloths, and armadillos of to-day. It was a peculiar and diversified mammalian fauna, of, on the whole, rather small species, and without any representatives of the animals with which man has been most familiar during his career on this earth.

Toward the end of the tertiary period there was an upheaval of land between this old South American island and North America, near what is now the Isthmus of Panama, thereby making a bridge across which the teeming animal life of the northern continent had access to this queer southern continent. There followed an inrush of huge, or swift, or formidable creatures which had attained their development in the fierce competition of the arctogæal realm. Elephants, camels, horses, tapirs, swine, sabre-toothed tigers, big cats, wolves, bears, deer, crowded into South America, warring each against the other incomers and against the old long-existing forms. A riot of life followed. Not only was the character of the South American fauna totally changed by the invasion of these creatures from the north, which soon swarmed over the continent, but it was also changed through the development wrought in the old inhabitants by the severe competition to which they were exposed. Many of the smaller or less capable types died out. Others developed enormous bulk or complete armor protection, and thereby saved themselves from the new beasts. In consequence, South America soon became populated with various new species of mastodons, sabre-toothed tigers, camels, horses, deer, cats, wolves, hooved creatures of strange shapes, and some of them of giant size, all of these being descended from the immigrant types; and side by side with them there grew up large autochthonous ungulates, giant ground-sloths well-nigh as large as elephants, and armored creatures as bulky as an ox but structurally of the armadillo or ant-eater type; and some of these latter not only held their own, but actually in their turn wandered north over the isthmus and invaded North America. A fauna as varied as that of Africa to-day, as abundant in species and individuals, even more noteworthy, because of its huge size or odd type, and because of the terrific prowess of the more formidable flesh-eaters, was thus developed in South America, and flourished for a period which human history would call very long indeed, but which geologically was short.

Then, for no reason that we can assign, destruction fell on this fauna. All the great and terrible creatures died out, the same fate befalling the changed representatives of the old autochthonous fauna and the descendants of the migrants that had come down from the north. Ground-sloth and glyptodon, sabre-tooth, horse and mastodon, and all the associated animals of large size vanished, and South America, though still retaining its connection with North America, once again became a land with a mammalian life small and weak compared to that of North America and the Old World. Its fauna is now marked, for instance, by the presence of medium-sized deer and cats, fox-like wolves, and small camel-like creatures, as well as by the presence of small armadillos, sloths, and ant-eaters. In other words, it includes diminutive representatives of the giants of the preceding era, both of the giants among the older forms of mammalia, and of the giants among the new and intrusive kinds. The change was wide-spread and extraordinary, and with our present means of information it is wholly inexplicable. There was no ice age, and it is hard to imagine any cause which would account for the extinction of so many species of huge or moderate size, while smaller representatives, and here and there medium-sized representatives, of many of them were left.

Now as to all of these phenomena in the evolution of species, there are, if not homologies, at least certain analogies, in the history of human societies, in the history of the rise to prominence, of the development and change, of the temporary dominance, and death or transformation, of the groups of varying kind which form races or nations. Here, as in biology, it is necessary to keep in mind that we use each of the words “birth” and “death,” “youth” and “age,” often very loosely, and sometimes as denoting either one of two totally different conceptions. Of course, in one sense there is no such thing as an “old” or a “young” nation, any more than there is an “old” or “young” family. Phylogenetically, the line of ancestral descent must be of exactly the same length for every existing individual, and for every group of individuals, whether forming a family or a nation. All that can properly be meant by the terms “new” and “young” is that in a given line of descent there has suddenly come a period of rapid change. This change may arise either from a new development or transformation of the old elements, or else from a new grouping of these elements with other and varied elements; so that the words “new” nation or “young” nation may have a real difference of significance in one case from what they have in another.

As in biology, so in human history, a new form may result from the specialization of a long-existing, and hitherto very slowly changing, generalized or non-specialized form; as, for instance, occurs when a barbaric race from a variety of causes suddenly develops a more complex cultivation and civilization. This is what occurred, for instance, in western Europe during the centuries of the Teutonic and, later, the Scandinavian ethnic overflows from the north. All the modern countries of western Europe are descended from the states created by these northern invaders. When first created they would be called “new” or “young” states in the sense that part or all of the people composing them were descended from races that hitherto had not been civilized, and that therefore, for the first time, entered on the career of civilized communities. In the southern part of western Europe the new states thus formed consisted in bulk of the inhabitants already in the land under the Roman Empire; and it was here that the new kingdoms first took shape. Through a reflex action their influence then extended back into the cold forests from which the invaders had come, and Germany and Scandinavia witnessed the rise of communities with essentially the same civilization as their southern neighbors; though in those communities, unlike the southern communities, there was no infusion of new blood, so that the new civilized nations which gradually developed were composed entirely of members of the same races which in the same regions had for ages lived the life of a slowly changing barbarism. The same was true of the Slavs and the Slavonized Finns of eastern Europe, when an infiltration of Scandinavian leaders from the north, and an infiltration of Byzantine culture from the south, joined to produce the changes which have gradually, out of the little Slav communities of the forest and the steppe, formed the mighty Russian Empire of to-day.

Again, the new form may represent merely a splitting off from a long-established, highly developed, and specialized nation. In this case the nation is usually spoken of as a “young,” and is correctly spoken of as a “new,” nation; but the term should always be used with a clear sense of the difference between what is described in such case, and what is described by the same term in speaking of a civilized nation just developed from barbarism. Carthage and Syracuse were new cities compared to Tyre and Corinth; but the Greek or Phœnician race was in every sense of the word as old in the new city as in the old city. So, nowadays, Victoria or Manitoba is a new community compared with England or Scotland; but the ancestral type of civilization and culture is as old in one case as in the other. I of course do not mean for a moment that great changes are not produced by the mere fact that the old civilized race is suddenly placed in surroundings where it has again to go through the work of taming the wilderness, a work finished many centuries before in the original home of the race; I merely mean that the ancestral history is the same in each case. We can rightly use the phrase “a new people,” in speaking of Canadians or Australians, Americans or Africanders. But we use it in an entirely different sense from that in which we use it when speaking of such communities as those founded by the Northmen and their descendants during that period of astonishing growth which saw the descendants of the Norse sea-thieves conquer and transform Normandy, Sicily, and the British Islands; we use it in an entirely different sense from that in which we use it when speaking of the new states that grew up around Warsaw, Kief, Novgorod, and Moscow, as the wild savages of the steppes and the marshy forests struggled haltingly and stumblingly upward to become builders of cities and to form stable governments. The kingdoms of Charlemagne and Alfred were “new,” compared to the empire on the Bosphorus; they were also in every way different; their lines of ancestral descent had nothing in common with that of the polyglot realm which paid tribute to the Cæsars of Byzantium; their social problems and after-time history were totally different. This is not true of those “new” nations which spring direct from old nations. Brazil, the Argentine, the United States, are all “new” nations, compared with the nations of Europe; but, with whatever changes in detail, their civilization is nevertheless of the general European type, as shown in Portugal, Spain, and England. The differences between these “new” American and these “old” European nations are not as great as those which separate the “new” nations one from another, and the “old” nations one from another. There are in each case very real differences between the new and the old nation; differences both for good and for evil; but in each case there is the same ancestral history to reckon with, the same type of civilization, with its attendant benefits and shortcomings; and, after the pioneer stages are passed, the problems to be solved, in spite of superficial differences, are in their essence the same; they are those that confront all civilized peoples, not those that confront only peoples struggling from barbarism into civilization.

So, when we speak of the “death” of a tribe, a nation, or a civilization, the term may be used for either one of two totally different processes, the analogy with what occurs in biological history being complete. Certain tribes of savages—the Tasmanians, for instance, and various little clans of American Indians—have within the last century or two completely died out; all of the individuals have perished, leaving no descendants, and the blood has disappeared. Certain other tribes of Indians have as tribes disappeared or are now disappearing; but their blood remains, being absorbed into the veins of the white intruders, or of the black men introduced by those white intruders; so that in reality they are merely being transformed into something absolutely different from what they were. In the United States, in the new State of Oklahoma, the Creeks, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Delawares, and other tribes are in process of absorption into the mass of the white population; when the State was admitted a couple of years ago, one of the two senators, and three of the five representatives in Congress, were partly of Indian blood. In but a few years these Indian tribes will have disappeared as completely as those that have actually died out; but the disappearance will be by absorption and transformation into the mass of the American population.

A like wide diversity in fact may be covered in the statement that a civilization has “died out.” The nationality and culture of the wonderful city-builders of the lower Mesopotamian Plain have completely disappeared, and, though doubtless certain influences dating therefrom are still at work, they are in such changed and hidden form as to be unrecognizable. But the disappearance of the Roman Empire was of no such character. There was complete change, far-reaching transformation, and at one period a violent dislocation; but it would not be correct to speak either of the blood or the culture of Old Rome as extinct. We are not yet in a position to dogmatize as to the permanence or evanescence of the various strains of blood that go to make up every civilized nationality; but it is reasonably certain that the blood of the old Roman still flows through the veins of the modern Italian; and though there has been much intermixture, from many different foreign sources—from foreign conquerors and from foreign slaves—yet it is probable that the Italian type of to-day finds its dominant ancestral type in the ancient Latin. As for the culture, the civilization of Rome, this is even more true. It has suffered a complete transformation, partly by natural growth, partly by absorption of totally alien elements, such as a Semitic religion, and certain Teutonic governmental and social customs; but the process was not one of extinction, but one of growth and transformation, both from within and by the accretion of outside elements. In France and Spain the inheritance of Latin blood is small; but the Roman culture which was forced on those countries has been tenaciously retained by them, throughout all their subsequent ethnical and political changes, as the basis on which their civilizations have been built. Moreover, the permanent spreading of Roman influence was not limited to Europe. It has extended to and over half of that New World which was not even dreamed of during the thousand years of brilliant life between the birth and the death of pagan Rome. This New World was discovered by one Italian, and its mainland first reached and named by another; and in it, over a territory many times the size of Trajan’s empire, the Spanish, French, and Portuguese adventurers founded, beside the Saint Lawrence and the Amazon, along the flanks of the Andes, and in the shadow of the snow-capped volcanoes of Mexico, from the Rio Grande to the Straits of Magellan, communities, now flourishing and growing apace, which in speech and culture, and even as regards one strain in their blood, are the lineal heirs of the ancient Latin civilization. When we speak of the disappearance, the passing away, of ancient Babylon or Nineveh, and of ancient Rome, we are using the same terms to describe totally different phenomena.

The anthropologist and historian of to-day realize much more clearly than their predecessors of a couple of generations back, how artificial most great nationalities are, and how loose is the terminology usually employed to describe them. There is an element of unconscious and rather pathetic humor in the simplicity of half a century ago which spoke of the Aryan and the Teuton with reverential admiration, as if the words denoted, not merely something definite, but something ethnologically sacred; the writers having much the same pride and faith in their own and their fellow countrymen’s purity of descent from these imaginary Aryan or Teutonic ancestors that was felt a few generations earlier by the various noble families who traced their lineage direct to Odin, Æneas, or Noah. Nowadays, of course, all students recognize that there may not be, and often is not, the slightest connection between kinship in blood and kinship in tongue. In America we find three races, white, red, and black, and three tongues, English, French, and Spanish, mingled in such a way that the lines of cleavage of race continually run at right angles to the lines of cleavage of speech; there being communities practically of pure blood of each race found speaking each language. Aryan and Teutonic are terms having very distinct linguistic meanings; but whether they have any such ethnical meanings as were formerly attributed to them is so doubtful, that we can not even be sure whether the ancestors of most of those we call Teutons originally spoke an Aryan tongue at all. The term Celtic, again, is perfectly clear when used linguistically; but when used to describe a race it means almost nothing until we find out which one of several totally different terminologies the writer or speaker is adopting. If, for instance, the term is used to designate the short-headed, medium-sized type common throughout middle Europe, from east to west, it denotes something entirely different from what is meant when the name is applied to the tall, yellow-haired opponents of the Romans and the later Greeks; while, if used to designate any modern nationality, it becomes about as loose and meaningless as the term Anglo-Saxon itself.

Most of the great societies which have developed a high civilization and have played a dominant part in the world have been—and are—artificial; not merely in social structure, but in the sense of including totally different race types. A great nation rarely belongs to any one race, though its citizens generally have one essentially national speech. Yet the curious fact remains that these great artificial societies acquire such unity that in each one all the parts feel a subtle sympathy, and move or cease to move, go forward or go back, all together, in response to some stir or throbbing, very powerful, and yet not to be discerned by our senses. National unity is far more apt than race unity to be a fact to reckon with; until indeed we come to race differences as fundamental as those which divide from one another the half-dozen great ethnic divisions of mankind, when they become so important that differences of nationality, speech, and creed sink into littleness.

An ethnological map of Europe in which the peoples were divided according to their physical and racial characteristics, such as stature, coloration, and shape of head, would bear no resemblance whatever to a map giving the political divisions, the nationalities, of Europe; while, on the contrary, a linguistic map would show a general correspondence between speech and nationality. The northern Frenchman is in blood and physical type more nearly allied to his German-speaking neighbor than to the Frenchman of the Mediterranean seaboard; and the latter, in his turn, is nearer to the Catalan than to the man who dwells beside the Channel or along the tributaries of the Rhine. But in essential characteristics, in the qualities that tell in the make-up of a nationality, all these kinds of Frenchmen feel keenly that they are one, and are different from all outsiders, their differences dwindling into insignificance compared with the extraordinary, artificially produced resemblances which bring them together and wall them off from the outside world. The same is true when we compare the German who dwells where the Alpine springs of the Danube and the Rhine interlace, with the physically different German of the Baltic lands. The same is true of Kentishman, Cornishman, and Yorkshireman in England.

In dealing, not with groups of human beings in simple and primitive relations, but with highly complex, highly specialized, civilized, or semi-civilized societies, there is need of great caution in drawing analogies with what has occurred in the development of the animal world. Yet even in these cases it is curious to see how some of the phenomena in the growth and disappearance of these complex, artificial groups of human beings resemble what has happened in myriads of instances in the history of life on this planet.

Why do great artificial empires, whose citizens are knit by a bond of speech and culture much more than by a bond of blood, show periods of extraordinary growth, and again of sudden or lingering decay? In some cases we can answer readily enough; in other cases we can not as yet even guess what the proper answer should be. If in any such case the centrifugal forces overcome the centripetal, the nation will of course fly to pieces, and the reason for its failure to become a dominant force is patent to every one. The minute that the spirit which finds its healthy development in local self-government, and is the antidote to the dangers of an extreme centralization, develops into mere particularism, into inability to combine effectively for achievement of a common end, then it is hopeless to expect great results. Poland and certain republics of the Western Hemisphere are the standard examples of failure of this kind; and the United States would have ranked with them, and her name would have become a byword of derision, if the forces of union had not triumphed in the Civil War. So, the growth of soft luxury after it has reached a certain point becomes a national danger patent to all. Again, it needs but little of the vision of a seer to foretell what must happen in any community if the average woman ceases to become the mother of a family of healthy children, if the average man loses the will and the power to work up to old age and to fight whenever the need arises. If the homely commonplace virtues die out, if strength of character vanishes in graceful self-indulgence, if the virile qualities atrophy, then the nation has lost what no material prosperity can offset.

But there are plenty of other phenomena wholly or partially inexplicable. It is easy to see why Rome trended downward when great slave-tilled farms spread over what had once been a countryside of peasant proprietors, when greed and luxury and sensuality ate like acids into the fibre of the upper classes, while the mass of the citizens grew to depend not upon their own exertions, but upon the state, for their pleasures and their very livelihood. But this does not explain why the forward movement stopped at different times, so far as different matters were concerned; at one time as regards literature, at another time as regards architecture, at another time as regards city-building. There is nothing mysterious about Rome’s dissolution at the time of the barbarian invasions; apart from the impoverishment and depopulation of the empire, its fall would be quite sufficiently explained by the mere fact that the average citizen had lost the fighting edge—an essential even under a despotism, and therefore far more essential in free, self-governing communities, such as those of the English-speaking peoples of to-day. The mystery is rather that out of the chaos and corruption of Roman society during the last days of the oligarchic republic, there should have sprung an empire able to hold things with reasonable steadiness for three or four centuries. But why, for instance, should the higher kinds of literary productiveness have ceased about the beginning of the second century, whereas the following centuries witnessed a great outbreak of energy in the shape of city-building in the provinces, not only in western Europe, but in Africa? We can not even guess why the springs of one kind of energy dried up, while there was yet no cessation of another kind.

Take another and smaller instance, that of Holland. For a period covering a little more than the seventeenth century, Holland, like some of the Italian city-states at an earlier period, stood on the dangerous heights of greatness, beside nations so vastly her superior in territory and population as to make it inevitable that sooner or later she must fall from the glorious and perilous eminence to which she had been raised by her own indomitable soul. Her fall came; it could not have been indefinitely postponed; but it came far quicker than it needed to come, because of shortcomings on her part to which both Great Britain and the United States would be wise to pay heed. Her government was singularly ineffective, the decentralization being such as often to permit the separatist, the particularist, spirit of the provinces to rob the central authority of all efficiency. This was bad enough. But the fatal weakness was that so common in rich, peace-loving societies, where men hate to think of war as possible, and try to justify their own reluctance to face it either by high-sounding moral platitudes, or else by a philosophy of short-sighted materialism. The Dutch were very wealthy. They grew to believe that they could hire others to do their fighting for them on land; and on sea, where they did their own fighting, and fought very well, they refused in time of peace to make ready fleets so efficient as either to insure them against the peace being broken or else to give them the victory when war came. To be opulent and unarmed is to secure ease in the present at the almost certain cost of disaster in the future.

It is therefore easy to see why Holland lost when she did her position among the powers; but it is far more difficult to explain why at the same time there should have come at least a partial loss of position in the world of art and letters. Some spark of divine fire burnt itself out in the national soul. As the line of great statesmen, of great warriors, by land and sea, came to an end, so the line of the great Dutch painters ended. The loss of pre-eminence in the schools followed the loss of pre-eminence in camp and in council chamber.

In the little republic of Holland, as in the great empire of Rome, it was not death which came, but transformation. Both Holland and Italy teach us that races that fall may rise again. In Holland, as in the Scandinavian kingdoms of Norway and Sweden, there was in a sense no decadence at all. There was nothing analogous to what has befallen so many countries: no lowering of the general standard of well-being, no general loss of vitality, no depopulation. What happened was, first a flowering time, in which the country’s men of action and men of thought gave it a commanding position among the nations of the day; then this period of command passed, and the state revolved in an eddy, aside from the sweep of the mighty current of world life; and yet the people themselves in their internal relations remained substantially unchanged, and in many fields of endeavor have now recovered themselves and play again a leading part.

In Italy, where history is recorded for a far longer time, the course of affairs was different. When the Roman Empire that was really Roman went down in ruin, there followed an interval of centuries when the gloom was almost unrelieved. Every form of luxury and frivolity, of contemptuous repugnance for serious work, of enervating self-indulgence, every form of vice and weakness which we regard as most ominous in the civilization of to-day, had been at work throughout Italy for generations. The nation had lost all patriotism. It had ceased to bring forth fighters or workers, had ceased to bring forth men of mark of any kind; and the remnant of the Italian people cowered in helpless misery among the horsehoofs of the barbarians, as the wild northern bands rode in to take the land for a prey and the cities for a spoil. It was one of the great cataclysms of history; but in the end it was seen that what came had been in part change and growth. It was not all mere destruction. Not only did Rome leave a vast heritage of language, culture, law, ideas, to all the modern world; but the people of Italy kept the old blood as the chief strain in their veins. In a few centuries came a wonderful new birth for Italy. Then for four or five hundred years there was a growth of many little city-states which, in their energy both in peace and war, in their fierce, fervent life, in the high quality of their men of arts and letters, and in their utter inability to combine so as to preserve order among themselves or to repel outside invasion, can not unfairly be compared with classic Greece. Again Italy fell, and the land was ruled by Spaniard or Frenchman or Austrian; and again, in the nineteenth century, there came for the third time a wonderful new birth.

Contrast this persistence of the old type in its old home, and in certain lands which it had conquered, with its utter disappearance in certain other lands where it was intrusive, but where it at one time seemed as firmly established as in Italy—certainly as in Spain or Gaul. No more curious example of the growth and disappearance of a national type can be found than in the case of the Greco-Roman dominion in Western Asia and North Africa. All told it extended over nearly a thousand years, from the days of Alexander till after the time of Heraclius. Throughout these lands there yet remain the ruins of innumerable cities which tell how firmly rooted that dominion must once have been. The overshadowing and far-reaching importance of what occurred is sufficiently shown by the familiar fact that the New Testament was written in Greek; while to the early Christians, North Africa seemed as much a Latin land as Sicily or the valley of the Po. The intrusive peoples and their culture flourished in the lands for a period twice as long as that which has elapsed since, with the voyage of Columbus, modern history may fairly be said to have begun; and then they withered like dry grass before the flame of the Arab invasion, and their place knew them no more. They overshadowed the ground; they vanished; and the old types reappeared in their old homes, with beside them a new type, the Arab.

Now, as to all these changes we can at least be sure of the main facts. We know that the Hollander remains in Holland, though the greatness of Holland has passed; we know that the Latin blood remains in Italy, whether to a greater or less extent; and that the Latin culture has died out in the African realm it once won, while it has lasted in Spain and France, and thence has extended itself to continents beyond the ocean. We may not know the causes of the facts, save partially; but the facts themselves we do know. But there are other cases in which we are at present ignorant even of the facts; we do not know what the changes really were, still less the hidden causes and meaning of these changes. Much remains to be found out before we can speak with any certainty as to whether some changes mean the actual dying out or the mere transformation of types. It is, for instance, astonishing how little permanent change in the physical make-up of the people seems to have been worked in Europe by the migrations of the races in historic times. A tall, fair-haired, long-skulled race penetrates to some southern country and establishes a commonwealth. The generations pass. There is no violent revolution, no break in continuity of history, nothing in the written records to indicate an epoch-making change at any given moment; and yet after a time we find that the old type has reappeared and that the people of the locality do not substantially differ in physical form from the people of other localities that did not suffer such an invasion. Does this mean that gradually the children of the invaders have dwindled and died out; or, as the blood is mixed with the ancient blood, has there been a change, part reversion and part assimilation, to the ancient type in its old surroundings? Do tint of skin, eyes and hair, shape of skull, and stature change in the new environment, so as to be like those of the older people who dwelt in this environment? Do the intrusive races, without change of blood, tend under the pressure of their new surroundings to change in type so as to resemble the ancient peoples of the land? Or, as the strains mingled, has the new strain dwindled and vanished, from causes as yet obscure? Has the blood of the Lombard practically disappeared from Italy, and of the Visigoth from Spain, or does it still flow in large populations where the old physical type has once more become dominant? Here in England, the long-skulled men of the long barrows, the short-skulled men of the round barrows—have they blended, or has one or the other type actually died out; or are they merged in some older race which they seemingly supplanted, or have they adopted the tongue and civilization of some later race which seemingly destroyed them? We can not say. We do not know which of the widely different stocks now speaking Aryan tongues represents in physical characteristics the ancient Aryan type, nor where the type originated, nor how or why it imposed its language on other types, nor how much or how little mixture of blood accompanied the change of tongue.

The phenomena of national growth and decay, both of those which can and those which can not be explained, have been peculiarly in evidence during the four centuries that have gone by since the discovery of America and the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope. These have been the four centuries of by far the most intense and constantly accelerating rapidity of movement and development that the world has yet seen. The movement has covered all the fields of human activity. It has witnessed an altogether unexampled spread of civilized mankind over the world, as well as an altogether unexampled advance in man’s dominion over nature; and this together with a literary and artistic activity to be matched in but one previous epoch. This period of extension and development has been that of one race, the so-called white race, or, to speak more accurately, the group of peoples living in Europe, who undoubtedly have a certain kinship of blood, who profess the Christian religion, and trace back their culture to Greece and Rome.

The memories of men are short, and it is easy to forget how brief is this period of unquestioned supremacy of the so-called white race. It is but a thing of yesterday. During the thousand years which went before the opening of this era of European supremacy, the attitude of Asia and Africa, of Hun and Mongol, Turk and Tartar, Arab and Moor, had on the whole been that of successful aggression against Europe. More than a century went by after the voyages of Columbus before the mastery in war began to pass from the Asiatic to the European. During that time Europe produced no generals or conquerors able to stand comparison with Selim and Solyman, Baber and Akbar. Then the European advance gathered momentum; until at the present time peoples of European blood hold dominion over all America and Australia and the islands of the sea, over most of Africa, and the major half of Asia. Much of this world conquest is merely political, and such a conquest is always likely in the long run to vanish. But very much of it represents not a merely political, but an ethnic conquest; the intrusive people having either exterminated or driven out the conquered peoples, or else having imposed upon them its tongue, law, culture, and religion, together with a strain of its blood. During this period substantially all of the world achievements worth remembering are to be credited to the people of European descent. The first exception of any consequence is the wonderful rise of Japan within the last generation—a phenomenon unexampled in history; for both in blood and in culture the Japanese line of ancestral descent is as remote as possible from ours; and yet Japan, while hitherto keeping most of what was strongest in her ancient character and traditions, has assimilated with curious completeness most of the characteristics that have given power and leadership to the West.

During this period of intense and feverish activity among the peoples of European stock, first one and then another has taken the lead. The movement began with Spain and Portugal. Their flowering-time was as brief as it was wonderful. The gorgeous pages of their annals are illumined by the figures of warriors, explorers, statesmen, poets, and painters. Then their days of greatness ceased. Many partial explanations can be given, but something remains behind, some hidden force for evil, some hidden source of weakness upon which we can not lay our hands. Yet there are many signs that in the New World, after centuries of arrested growth, the peoples of Spanish and Portuguese stock are entering upon another era of development, and there are other signs that this is true also in the Iberian peninsula itself.

About the time that the first brilliant period of the leadership of the Iberian peoples was drawing to a close, at the other end of Europe, in the land of melancholy steppe and melancholy forest, the Slav turned in his troubled sleep and stretched out his hand to grasp leadership and dominion. Since then almost every nation of Europe has at one time or another sought a place in the movement of expansion; but for the last three centuries the great phenomenon of mankind has been the growth of the English-speaking peoples and their spread over the world’s waste spaces.

Comparison is often made between the empire of Britain and the empire of Rome. When judged relatively to the effect on all modern civilization, the empire of Rome is of course the more important, simply because all the nations of Europe and their offshoots in other continents trace back their culture either to the earlier Rome by the Tiber, or the later Rome by the Bosphorus. The empire of Rome is the most stupendous fact in lay history; no empire later in time can be compared with it. But this is merely another way of saying that the nearer the source the more important becomes any deflection of the stream’s current. Absolutely, comparing the two empires one with the other in point of actual achievement, and disregarding the immensely increased effect on other civilizations which inhered in the older empire because it antedated the younger by a couple of thousand years, there is little to choose between them as regards the wide and abounding interest and importance of their careers.

In the world of antiquity each great empire rose when its predecessor had already crumbled. By the time that Rome loomed large over the horizon of history, there were left for her to contend with only decaying civilizations and raw barbarism. When she conquered Pyrrhus, she strove against the strength of but one of the many fragments into which Alexander’s kingdom had fallen. When she conquered Carthage, she overthrew a foe against whom for two centuries the single Greek city of Syracuse had contended on equal terms; it was not the Sepoy armies of the Carthaginian plutocracy, but the towering genius of the House of Barca, which rendered the struggle forever memorable. It was the distance and the desert, rather than the Parthian horse-bowmen, that set bounds to Rome in the east; and on the north her advance was curbed by the vast reaches of marshy woodland, rather than by the tall barbarians who dwelt therein. During the long generations of her greatness, and until the sword dropped from her withered hand, the Parthian was never a menace of aggression, and the German threatened her but to die.

On the contrary, the great expansion of England has occurred, the great empire of Britain has been achieved, during the centuries that have also seen mighty military nations rise and flourish on the continent of Europe. It is as if Rome, while creating and keeping the empire she won between the days of Scipio and the days of Trajan, had at the same time held her own with the Nineveh of Sargon and Tiglath, the Egypt of Thothmes and Rameses, and the kingdoms of Persia and Macedon in the red flush of their warrior-dawn. The empire of Britain is vaster in space, in population, in wealth, in wide variety of possession, in a history of multiplied and manifold achievement of every kind, than even the glorious empire of Rome. Yet, unlike Rome, Britain has won dominion in every clime, has carried her flag by conquest and settlement to the uttermost ends of the earth, at the very time that haughty and powerful rivals, in their abounding youth or strong maturity, were eager to set bounds to her greatness, and to tear from her what she had won afar. England has peopled continents with her children, has swayed the destinies of teeming myriads of alien race, has ruled ancient monarchies, and wrested from all corners the right to the world’s waste spaces, while at home she has held her own before nations, each of military power comparable to Rome’s at her zenith.

Rome fell by attack from without only because the ills within her own borders had grown incurable. What is true of your country, my hearers, is true of my own; while we should be vigilant against foes from without, yet we need never really fear them so long as we safeguard ourselves against the enemies within our own households; and these enemies are our own passions and follies. Free peoples can escape being mastered by others only by being able to master themselves. We Americans and you people of the British Isles alike need ever to keep in mind that, among the many qualities indispensable to the success of a great democracy, and second only to a high and stern sense of duty, of moral obligation, are self-knowledge and self-mastery. You, my hosts, and I may not agree in all our views; some of you would think me a very radical democrat—as, for the matter of that, I am—and my theory of imperialism would probably suit the anti-imperialists as little as it would suit a certain type of forcible-feeble imperialist. But there are some points on which we must all agree if we think soundly. The precise form of government, democratic or otherwise, is the instrument, the tool, with which we work. It is important to have a good tool. But, even if it is the best possible, it is only a tool. No implement can ever take the place of the guiding intelligence that wields it. A very bad tool will ruin the work of the best craftsman; but a good tool in bad hands is no better. In the last analysis the all-important factor in national greatness is national character.

There are questions which we of the great civilized nations are ever tempted to ask of the future. Is our time of growth drawing to an end? Are we as nations soon to come under the rule of that great law of death which is itself but part of the great law of life? None can tell. Forces that we can see, and other forces that are hidden or that can but dimly be apprehended, are at work all around us, both for good and for evil. The growth in luxury, in love of ease, in taste for vapid and frivolous excitement, is both evident and unhealthy. The most ominous sign is the diminution in the birth-rate, in the rate of natural increase, now to a larger or lesser degree shared by most of the civilized nations of central and western Europe, of America and Australia—a diminution so great that, if it continues for the next century at the rate which has obtained for the last twenty-five years, all the more highly civilized peoples will be stationary or else have begun to go backward in population, while many of them will have already gone very far backward.

There is much that should give us concern for the future. But there is much also which should give us hope. No man is more apt to be mistaken than the prophet of evil. After the French Revolution in 1830 Niebuhr hazarded the guess that all civilization was about to go down with a crash, that we were all about to share the fall of third- and fourth-century Rome—a respectable, but painfully overworked, comparison. The fears once expressed by the followers of Malthus as to the future of the world have proved groundless as regards the civilized portion of the world; it is strange indeed to look back at Carlyle’s prophecies of some seventy years ago, and then think of the teeming life of achievement, the life of conquest of every kind, and of noble effort crowned by success, which has been ours for the two generations since he complained to High Heaven that all the tales had been told and all the songs sung, and that all the deeds really worth doing had been done. I believe with all my heart that a great future remains for us; but whether it does or does not, our duty is not altered. However the battle may go, the soldier worthy of the name will with utmost vigor do his allotted task, and bear himself as valiantly in defeat as in victory. Come what will, we belong to peoples who have not yielded to the craven fear of being great. In the ages that have gone by, the great nations, the nations that have expanded and that have played a mighty part in the world, have in the end grown old and weakened and vanished; but so have the nations whose only thought was to avoid all danger, all effort, who would risk nothing, and who therefore gained nothing. In the end, the same fate may overwhelm all alike; but the memory of the one type perishes with it, while the other leaves its mark deep on the history of all the future of mankind.

A nation that seemingly dies may be born again; and even though in the physical sense it die utterly, it may yet hand down a history of heroic achievement, and for all time to come may profoundly influence the nations that arise in its place by the impress of what it has done. Best of all is it to do our part well, and at the same time to see our blood live young and vital in men and women fit to take up the task as we lay it down; for so shall our seed inherit the earth. But if this, which is best, is denied us, then at least it is ours to remember that if we choose we can be torch-bearers, as our fathers were before us. The torch has been handed on from nation to nation, from civilization to civilization, throughout all recorded time, from the dim years before history dawned down to the blazing splendor of this teeming century of ours. It dropped from the hands of the coward and the sluggard, of the man wrapped in luxury or love of ease, the man whose soul was eaten away by self-indulgence; it has been kept alight only by those who were mighty of heart and cunning of hand. What they worked at, provided it was worth doing at all, was of less matter than how they worked, whether in the realm of the mind or the realm of the body. If their work was good, if what they achieved was of substance, then high success was really theirs.

In the first part of this lecture I drew certain analogies between what has occurred to forms of animal life through the procession of the ages on this planet, and what has occurred and is occurring to the great artificial civilizations which have gradually spread over the world’s surface during the thousands of years that have elapsed since cities of temples and palaces first rose beside the Nile and the Euphrates, and the harbors of Minoan Crete bristled with the masts of the Ægean craft. But of course the parallel is true only in the roughest and most general way. Moreover, even between the civilizations of to-day and the civilizations of ancient times there are differences so profound that we must be cautious in drawing any conclusions for the present based on what has happened in the past. While freely admitting all of our follies and weaknesses of to-day, it is yet mere perversity to refuse to realize the incredible advance that has been made in ethical standards. I do not believe that there is the slightest necessary connection between any weakening of virile force and this advance in the moral standard, this growth of the sense of obligation to one’s neighbor and of reluctance to do that neighbor wrong. We need have scant patience with that silly cynicism which insists that kindliness of character only accompanies weakness of character. On the contrary, just as in private life many of the men of strongest character are the very men of loftiest and most exalted morality, so I believe that in national life, as the ages go by, we shall find that the permanent national types will more and more tend to become those in which, though intellect stands high, character stands higher; in which rugged strength and courage, rugged capacity to resist wrongful aggression by others, will go hand in hand with a lofty scorn of doing wrong to others. This is the type of Timoleon, of Hampden, of Washington, and Lincoln. These were as good men, as disinterested and unselfish men, as ever served a state; and they were also as strong men as ever founded or saved a state. Surely such examples prove that there is nothing Utopian in our effort to combine justice and strength in the same nation. The really high civilizations must themselves supply the antidote to the self-indulgence and love of ease which they tend to produce.

Every modern civilized nation has many and terrible problems to solve within its own borders, problems that arise not merely from juxtaposition of poverty and riches, but especially from the self-consciousness of both poverty and riches. Each nation must deal with these matters in its own fashion, and yet the spirit in which the problem is approached must ever be fundamentally the same. It must be a spirit of broad humanity, of brotherly kindness, of acceptance of responsibility, one for each and each for all, and at the same time a spirit as remote as the poles from every form of weakness and sentimentality. As in war to pardon the coward is to do cruel wrong to the brave man whose life his cowardice jeopardizes, so in civil affairs it is revolting to every principle of justice to give to the lazy, the vicious, or even the feeble or dull-witted a reward which is really the robbery of what braver, wiser, abler men have earned. The only effective way to help any man is to help him to help himself; and the worst lesson to teach him is that he can be permanently helped at the expense of some one else. True liberty shows itself to best advantage in protecting the rights of others, and especially of minorities. Privilege should not be tolerated because it is to the advantage of a minority; nor yet because it is to the advantage of a majority. No doctrinaire theories of vested rights or freedom of contract can stand in the way of our cutting out abuses from the body politic. Just as little can we afford to follow the doctrinaires of an impossible—and incidentally of a highly undesirable—social revolution which, in destroying individual rights—including property rights—and the family, would destroy the two chief agents in the advance of mankind, and the two chief reasons why either the advance or the preservation of mankind is worth while. It is an evil and a dreadful thing to be callous to sorrow and suffering and blind to our duty to do all things possible for the betterment of social conditions. But it is an unspeakably foolish thing to strive for this betterment by means so destructive that they would leave no social conditions to better. In dealing with all these social problems, with the intimate relations of the family, with wealth in private use and business use, with labor, with poverty, the one prime necessity is to remember that, though hardness of heart is a great evil, it is no greater an evil than softness of head.

But in addition to these problems, the most intimate and important of all, and which to a larger or less degree affect all the modern nations somewhat alike, we of the great nations that have expanded, that are now in complicated relations with one another and with alien races, have special problems and special duties of our own. You belong to a nation which possesses the greatest empire upon which the sun has ever shone. I belong to a nation which is trying, on a scale hitherto unexampled, to work out the problems of government for, of, and by the people, while at the same time doing the international duty of a great Power. But there are certain problems which both of us have to solve, and as to which our standards should be the same. The Englishman, the man of the British Isles, in his various homes across the seas, and the American, both at home and abroad, are brought into contact with utterly alien peoples, some with a civilization more ancient than our own, others still in, or having but recently arisen from, the barbarism which our people left behind ages ago. The problems that arise are of well-nigh inconceivable difficulty. They can not be solved by the foolish sentimentality of stay-at-home people, with little patent recipes and those cut-and-dried theories of the political nursery which have such limited applicability amid the crash of elemental forces. Neither can they be solved by the raw brutality of the men who, whether at home or on the rough frontier of civilization, adopt might as the only standard of right in dealing with other men, and treat alien races only as subjects for exploitation.

No hard-and-fast rule can be drawn as applying to all alien races, because they differ from one another far more widely than some of them differ from us. But there are one or two rules which must not be forgotten. In the long run there can be no justification for one race managing or controlling another unless the management and control are exercised in the interest and for the benefit of that other race. This is what our peoples have in the main done, and must continue in the future in even greater degree to do, in India, Egypt, and the Philippines alike. In the next place, as regards every race, everywhere, at home or abroad, we can not afford to deviate from the great rule of righteousness which bids us treat each man on his worth as a man. He must not be sentimentally favored because he belongs to a given race; he must not be given immunity in wrong-doing or permitted to cumber the ground, or given other privileges which would be denied to the vicious and unfit among ourselves. On the other hand, where he acts in a way which would entitle him to respect and reward if he was one of our own stock, he is just as entitled to that respect and reward if he comes of another stock, even though that other stock produces a much smaller proportion of men of his type than does our own. This has nothing to do with social intermingling, with what is called social equality. It has to do merely with the question of doing to each man and each woman that elementary justice which will permit him or her to gain from life the reward which should always accompany thrift, sobriety, self-control, respect for the rights of others, and hard and intelligent work to a given end. To more than such just treatment no man is entitled, and less than such just treatment no man should receive.

The other type of duty is the international duty, the duty owed by one nation to another. I hold that the laws of morality which should govern individuals in their dealings one with the other, are just as binding concerning nations in their dealings one with the other. The application of the moral law must be different in the two cases, because in one case it has, and in the other it has not, the sanction of a civil law with force behind it. The individual can depend for his rights upon the courts, which themselves derive their force from the police power of the state. The nation can depend upon nothing of the kind; and therefore, as things are now, it is the highest duty of the most advanced and freest peoples to keep themselves in such a state of readiness as to forbid to any barbarism or despotism the hope of arresting the progress of the world by striking down the nations that lead in that progress. It would be foolish indeed to pay heed to the unwise persons who desire disarmament to be begun by the very peoples who, of all others, should not be left helpless before any possible foe. But we must reprobate quite as strongly both the leaders and the peoples who practise, or encourage, or condone, aggression and iniquity by the strong at the expense of the weak. We should tolerate lawlessness and wickedness neither by the weak nor by the strong; and both weak and strong we should in return treat with scrupulous fairness. The foreign policy of a great and self-respecting country should be conducted on exactly the same plane of honor, for insistence upon one’s own rights and of respect for the rights of others, that marks the conduct of a brave and honorable man when dealing with his fellows. Permit me to support this statement out of my own experience. For nearly eight years I was the head of a great nation, and charged especially with the conduct of its foreign policy; and during those years I took no action with reference to any other people on the face of the earth that I would not have felt justified in taking as an individual in dealing with other individuals.

I believe that we of the great civilized nations of to-day have a right to feel that long careers of achievement lie before our several countries. To each of us is vouchsafed the honorable privilege of doing his part, however small, in that work. Let us strive hardily for success, even if by so doing we risk failure, spurning the poorer souls of small endeavor, who know neither failure nor success. Let us hope that our own blood shall continue in the land, that our children and children’s children to endless generations shall arise to take our places and play a mighty and dominant part in the world. But whether this be denied or granted by the years we shall not see, let at least the satisfaction be ours that we have carried onward the lighted torch in our own day and generation. If we do this, then, as our eyes close, and we go out into the darkness, and others’ hands grasp the torch, at least we can say that our part has been borne well and valiantly.

THE WORLD MOVEMENT

THE WORLD MOVEMENT3

I very highly appreciate the chance to address the University of Berlin in the year that closes its first centenary of existence. It is difficult for you in the Old World fully to appreciate the feelings of a man who comes from a nation still in the making to a country with an immemorial historic past; and especially is this the case when that country, with its ancient past behind it, yet looks with proud confidence into the future, and in the present shows all the abounding vigor of lusty youth. Such is the case with Germany. More than a thousand years have passed since the Roman Empire of the West became in fact a German empire. Throughout mediæval times the Empire and the Papacy were the two central features in the history of the Occident. With the Ottos and the Henrys began the slow rise of that Western life which has shaped modern Europe, and therefore ultimately the whole modern world. Their task was to organize society and to keep it from crumbling to pieces. They were castle-builders, city-founders, road-makers; they battled to bring order out of the seething turbulence around them; and at the same time they first beat back heathendom and then slowly wrested from it its possessions.

3 Delivered at the University of Berlin, May 12, 1910.

After the downfall of Rome and the breaking in sunder of the Roman Empire, the first real crystallization of the forces that were working for a new uplift of civilization in western Europe was round the Karling house, and, above all, round the great Emperor, Karl the Great, the seat of whose empire was at Aachen. Under the Karlings the Arab and the Moor were driven back beyond the Pyrenees; the last of the old heathen Germans were forced into Christianity, and the Avars, wild horsemen from the Asian steppes, who had long held tented dominion in middle Europe, were utterly destroyed. With the break-up of the Karling empire came chaos once more, and a fresh inrush of savagery: Vikings from the frozen north, and new hordes of outlandish riders from Asia. It was the early emperors of Germany proper who quelled these barbarians; in their time Dane and Norseman and Magyar became Christians, and most of the Slav peoples as well, so that Europe began to take on a shape which we can recognize to-day. Since then the centuries have rolled by, with strange alternations of fortune, now well-nigh barren, and again great with German achievement in arms and in government, in science and the arts. The centre of power shifted hither and thither within German lands; the great house of Hohenzollern rose, the house which has at last seen Germany spring into a commanding position in the very forefront among the nations of mankind.

To this ancient land, with its glorious past and splendid present, to this land of many memories and of eager hopes, I come from a young nation, which is by blood akin to, and yet different from, each of the great nations of middle and western Europe; which has inherited or acquired much from each, but is changing and developing every inheritance and acquisition into something new and strange. The German strain in our blood is large, for almost from the beginning there has been a large German element among the successive waves of newcomers whose children’s children have been and are being fused into the American nation; and I myself trace my origin to that branch of the Low Dutch stock which raised Holland out of the North Sea. Moreover, we have taken from you, not only much of the blood that runs through our veins, but much of the thought that shapes our minds. For generations American scholars have flocked to your universities, and, thanks to the wise foresight of his Imperial Majesty the present Emperor, the intimate and friendly connection between the two countries is now in every way closer than it has ever been before.

Germany is pre-eminently a country in which the world movement of to-day in all of its multitudinous aspects is plainly visible. The life of this university covers the period during which that movement has spread until it is felt throughout every continent, while its velocity has been constantly accelerating, so that the face of the world has changed, and is now changing, as never before. It is therefore fit and appropriate here to speak on this subject.

When, in the slow procession of the ages, man was developed on this planet, the change worked by his appearance was at first slight. Further ages passed while he groped and struggled by infinitesimal degrees upward through the lower grades of savagery; for the general law is that life which is advanced and complex, whatever its nature, changes more quickly than simpler and less advanced forms. The life of savages changes and advances with extreme slowness, and groups of savages influence one another but little. The first rudimentary beginnings of that complex life of communities which we call civilization marked a period when man had already long been by far the most important creature on the planet. The history of the living world had become, in fact, the history of man, and therefore something totally different in kind as well as in degree from what it had been before. There are interesting analogies between what has gone on in the development of life generally and what has gone on in the development of human society. [These I have discussed in the preceding chapter.] But the differences are profound, and go to the root of things.

Throughout their early stages the movements of civilization—for, properly speaking, there was no one movement—were very slow, were local in space, and were partial in the sense that each developed along but few lines. Of the numberless years that covered these early stages we have no record. They were the years that saw such extraordinary discoveries and inventions as fire, and the wheel, and the bow, and the domestication of animals. So local were these inventions that at the present day there yet linger savage tribes, still fixed in the half-bestial life of an infinitely remote past, who know none of them except fire—and the discovery and use of fire may have marked, not the beginning of civilization, but the beginning of the savagery which separated man from brute.

Even after civilization and culture had achieved a relatively high position, they were still purely local, and from this fact subject to violent shocks. Modern research has shown the existence in prehistoric or, at least, protohistoric times of many peoples who, in given localities, achieved a high and peculiar culture, a culture that was later so completely destroyed that it is difficult to say what, if any, traces it left on the subsequent cultures out of which we have developed our own, while it is also difficult to say exactly how much any one of these cultures influenced any other. In many cases, as where invaders with weapons of bronze or iron conquered the neolithic peoples, the higher civilization completely destroyed the lower civilization, or barbarism, with which it came in contact. In other cases, while superiority in culture gave its possessors at the beginning a marked military and governmental superiority over the neighboring peoples, yet sooner or later there accompanied it a certain softness or enervating quality which left the cultured folk at the mercy of the stark and greedy neighboring tribes, in whose savage souls cupidity gradually overcame terror and awe. Then the people that had been struggling upward would be engulfed, and the levelling waves of barbarism wash over them. But we are not yet in position to speak definitely on these matters. It is only the researches of recent years that have enabled us so much as to guess at the course of events in prehistoric Greece; while as yet we can hardly even hazard a guess as to how, for instance, the Hallstadt culture rose and fell, or as to the history and fate of the builders of those strange ruins of which Stonehenge is the type.

The first civilizations which left behind them clear records rose in that hoary historic past which geologically is part of the immediate present—and which is but a span’s length from the present, even when compared only with the length of time that man has lived on this planet. These first civilizations were those which rose in Mesopotamia and the Nile valley some six or eight thousand years ago. As far as we can see, they were well-nigh independent centres of cultural development, and our knowledge is not such at present as to enable us to connect either with the early cultural movements, in southwestern Europe on the one hand, or in India on the other, or with that Chinese civilization which has been so profoundly affected by Indian influences.

Compared with the civilizations with which we are best acquainted, the striking features in the Mesopotamian and Nilotic civilizations were the length of time they endured and their comparative changelessness. The kings, priests, and peoples who dwelt by the Nile or Euphrates are found thinking much the same thoughts, doing much the same deeds, leaving at least very similar records, while time passes in tens of centuries. Of course there was change; of course there were action and reaction in influence between them and their neighbors; and the movement of change, of development, material, mental, spiritual, was much faster than anything that had occurred during the eons of mere savagery. But in contradistinction to modern times the movement was very slow indeed; and, moreover, in each case it was strongly localized, while the field of endeavor was narrow. There were certain conquests by man over nature; there were certain conquests in the domain of pure intellect; there were certain extensions which spread the area of civilized mankind. But it would be hard to speak of it as a “world movement” at all, for by far the greater part of the habitable globe was not only unknown, but its existence unguessed at, so far as peoples with any civilization whatsoever were concerned.

With the downfall of these ancient civilizations there sprang into prominence those peoples with whom our own cultural history may be said to begin. Those ideas and influences in our lives which we can consciously trace back at all are in the great majority of instances to be traced to the Jew, the Greek, or the Roman; and the ordinary man, when he speaks of the nations of antiquity, has in mind specifically these three peoples—although, judged even by the history of which we have record, theirs is a very modern antiquity indeed.

The case of the Jew was quite exceptional. His was a small nation, of little more consequence than the sister nations of Moab and Damascus, until all three, and the other petty states of the country, fell under the yoke of the alien. Then he survived, while all his fellows died. In the spiritual domain he contributed a religion which has been the most potent of all factors in its effect on the subsequent history of mankind; but none of his other contributions compare with the legacies left us by the Greek and the Roman.

The Greco-Roman world saw a civilization far more brilliant, far more varied and intense, than any that had gone before it, and one that affected a far larger share of the world’s surface. For the first time there began to be something which at least foreshadowed a “world movement” in the sense that it affected a considerable portion of the world’s surface and that it represented what was incomparably the most important of all that was happening in world history at the time. In breadth and depth the field of intellectual interest had greatly broadened at the same time that the physical area affected by the civilization had similarly extended. Instead of a civilization affecting only one river valley or one nook of the Mediterranean, there was a civilization which directly or indirectly influenced mankind from the Desert of Sahara to the Baltic, from the Atlantic Ocean to the westernmost mountain chains that spring from the Himalayas. Throughout most of this region there began to work certain influences which, though with widely varying intensity, did nevertheless tend to affect a large portion of mankind. In many of the forms of science, in almost all the forms of art, there was great activity. In addition to great soldiers there were great administrators and statesmen whose concern was with the fundamental questions of social and civil life. Nothing like the width and variety of intellectual achievement and understanding had ever before been known; and for the first time we come across great intellectual leaders, great philosophers and writers, whose works are a part of all that is highest in modern thought, whose writings are as alive to-day as when they were first issued; and there were others of even more daring and original temper, a philosopher like Democritus, a poet like Lucretius, whose minds leaped ahead through the centuries and saw what none of their contemporaries saw, but who were so hampered by their surroundings that it was physically impossible for them to leave to the later world much concrete addition to knowledge. The civilization was one of comparatively rapid change, viewed by the standard of Babylon and Memphis. There was incessant movement; and, moreover, the whole system went down with a crash to seeming destruction after a period short compared with that covered by the reigns of a score of Egyptian dynasties, or with the time that elapsed between a Babylonian defeat by Elam and a war sixteen centuries later which fully avenged it.

This civilization flourished with brilliant splendor. Then it fell. In its northern seats it was overwhelmed by a wave of barbarism from among those half-savage peoples from whom you and I, my hearers, trace our descent. In the south and east it was destroyed later, but far more thoroughly, by invaders of an utterly different type. Both conquests were of great importance; but it was the northern conquest which in its ultimate effects was of by far the greatest importance.

With the advent of the Dark Ages the movement of course ceased, and it did not begin anew for many centuries; while a thousand years passed before it was once more in full swing, so far as European civilization, so far as the world civilization of to-day, is concerned. During all those centuries the civilized world, in our acceptation of the term, was occupied, as its chief task, in slowly climbing back to the position from which it had fallen after the age of the Antonines. Of course a general statement like this must be accepted with qualifications. There is no hard-and-fast line between one age or period and another, and in no age is either progress or retrogression universal in all things. There were many points in which the Middle Ages, because of the simple fact that they were Christian, surpassed the brilliant pagan civilization of the past; and there are some points in which the civilization that succeeded them has sunk below the level of the ages which saw such mighty masterpieces of poetry, of architecture—especially cathedral architecture—and of serene spiritual and forceful lay leadership. But they were centuries of violence, rapine, and cruel injustice; and truth was so little heeded that the noble and daring spirits who sought it, especially in its scientific form, did so in deadly peril of the fagot and the halter.

During this period there were several very important extra-European movements, one or two of which deeply affected Europe. Islam arose, and conquered far and wide, uniting fundamentally different races into a brotherhood of feeling which Christianity has never been able to rival, and at the time of the Crusades profoundly influencing European culture. It produced a civilization of its own, brilliant and here and there useful, but hopelessly limited when compared with the civilization of which we ourselves are the heirs. The great cultured peoples of southeastern and eastern Asia continued their checkered development totally unaffected by, and without knowledge of, any European influence.

Throughout the whole period there came against Europe, out of the unknown wastes of central Asia, an endless succession of strange and terrible conqueror races whose mission was mere destruction—Hun and Avar, Mongol, Tartar, and Turk. These fierce and squalid tribes of warrior horsemen flailed mankind with red scourges, wasted and destroyed, and then vanished from the ground they had overrun. But in no way worth noting did they count in the advance of mankind.

At last, a little over four hundred years ago, the movement toward a world civilization took up its interrupted march. The beginning of the modern movement may roughly be taken as synchronizing with the discovery of printing, and with that series of bold sea ventures which culminated in the discovery of America; and, after these two epochal feats had begun to produce their full effects in material and intellectual life, it became inevitable that civilization should thereafter differ not only in degree but even in kind from all that had gone before. Immediately after the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama there began a tremendous religious ferment; the awakening of intellect went hand in hand with the moral uprising; the great names of Copernicus, Bruno, Kepler, and Galileo show that the mind of man was breaking the fetters that had cramped it; and for the first time experimentation was used as a check upon observation and theorization. Since then, century by century, the changes have increased in rapidity and complexity, and have attained their maximum in both respects during the century just past. Instead of being directed by one or two dominant peoples, as was the case with all similar movements of the past, the new movement was shared by many different nations. From every standpoint it has been of infinitely greater moment than anything hitherto seen. Not in one but in many different peoples there has been extraordinary growth in wealth, in population, in power of organization, and in mastery over mechanical activity and natural resources. All of this has been accompanied and signalized by an immense outburst of energy and restless initiative. The result is as varied as it is striking.

In the first place, representatives of this civilization, by their conquest of space, were enabled to spread into all the practically vacant continents, while at the same time, by their triumphs in organization and mechanical invention, they acquired an unheard-of military superiority as compared with their former rivals. To these two facts is primarily due the further fact that for the first time there is really something that approaches a world civilization, a world movement. The spread of the European peoples since the days of Ferdinand the Catholic and Ivan the Terrible has been across every sea and over every continent. In places the conquests have been ethnic; that is, there has been a new wandering of the peoples, and new commonwealths have sprung up in which the people are entirely or mainly of European blood. This is what happened in the temperate and subtropical regions of the Western Hemisphere, in Australia, in portions of northern Asia and southern Africa. In other places the conquest has been purely political, the Europeans representing for the most part merely a small caste of soldiers and administrators, as in most of tropical Asia and Africa, and in much of tropical America. Finally, here and there instances occur where there has been no conquest at all, but where an alien people is profoundly and radically changed by the mere impact of Western civilization. The most extraordinary instance of this, of course, is Japan; for Japan’s growth and change during the last half-century has been in many ways the most striking phenomenon of all history. Intensely proud of her past history, intensely loyal to certain of her past traditions, she has yet with a single effort wrenched herself free from all hampering ancient ties, and with a bound has taken her place among the leading civilized nations of mankind.

There are, of course, many grades between these different types of influence, but the net outcome of what has occurred during the last four centuries is that civilization of the European type now exercises a more or less profound effect over practically the entire world. There are nooks and corners to which it has not yet penetrated; but there is at present no large space of territory in which the general movement of civilized activity does not make itself more or less felt. This represents something wholly different from what has ever hitherto been seen. In the greatest days of Roman dominion the influence of Rome was felt over only a relatively small portion of the world’s surface. Over much the larger part of the world the process of change and development was absolutely unaffected by anything that occurred in the Roman Empire; and those communities the play of whose influence was felt in action and reaction, and in interaction, among themselves, were grouped immediately around the Mediterranean. Now, however, the whole world is bound together as never before; the bonds are sometimes those of hatred rather than love, but they are bonds nevertheless.

Frowning or hopeful, every man of leadership in any line of thought or effort must now look beyond the limits of his own country. The student of sociology may live in Berlin or Saint Petersburg, Rome or London, or he may live in Melbourne or San Francisco or Buenos Ayres; but in whatever city he lives, he must pay heed to the studies of men who live in each of the other cities. When in America we study labor problems and attempt to deal with subjects such as life-insurance for wage-workers, we turn to see what you do here in Germany, and we also turn to see what the far-off commonwealth of New Zealand is doing. When a great German scientist is warring against the most dreaded enemies of mankind, creatures of infinitesimal size which the microscope reveals in his blood, he may spend his holidays of study in central Africa or in eastern Asia; and he must know what is accomplished in the laboratories of Tokio, just as he must know the details of that practical application of science which has changed the Isthmus of Panama from a death-trap into what is almost a health resort. Every progressive in China is striving to introduce Western methods of education and administration, and hundreds of European and American books are now translated into Chinese. The influence of European governmental principles is strikingly illustrated by the fact that admiration for them has broken down the iron barriers of Moslem conservatism, so that their introduction has become a burning question in Turkey and Persia; while the very unrest, the impatience of European or American control, in India, Egypt, or the Philippines, takes the form of demanding that the government be assimilated more closely to what it is in England or the United States. The deeds and works of any great statesman, the preachings of any great ethical, social, or political teacher, now find echoes in both hemispheres and in every continent. From a new discovery in science to a new method of combating or applying socialism, there is no movement of note which can take place in any part of the globe without powerfully affecting masses of people in Europe, America, and Australia, in Asia and Africa. For weal or for woe, the peoples of mankind are knit together far closer than ever before.

So much for the geographical side of the expansion of modern civilization. But only a few of the many and intense activities of modern civilization have found their expression on this side. The movement has been just as striking in its conquest over natural forces, in its searching inquiry into and about the soul of things.

The conquest over Nature has included an extraordinary increase in every form of knowledge of the world we live in, and also an extraordinary increase in the power of utilizing the forces of Nature. In both directions the advance has been very great during the past four or five centuries, and in both directions it has gone on with ever-increasing rapidity during the last century. After the great age of Rome had passed, the boundaries of knowledge shrank, and in many cases it was not until well-nigh our own times that her domain was once again pushed beyond the ancient landmarks. About the year 150 A. D., Ptolemy, the geographer, published his map of central Africa and the sources of the Nile, and this map was more accurate than any which we had as late as 1850 A. D. More was known of physical science, and more of the truth about the physical world was guessed at, in the days of Pliny, than was known or guessed until the modern movement began. The case was the same as regards military science. At the close of the Middle Ages the weapons were what they had always been—sword, shield, bow, spear; and any improvement in them was more than offset by the loss in knowledge of military organization, in the science of war, and in military leadership since the days of Hannibal and Cæsar. A hundred years ago, when this university was founded, the methods of transportation did not differ in the essentials from what they had been among the highly civilized nations of antiquity. Travellers and merchandise went by land in wheeled vehicles or on beasts of burden, and by sea in boats propelled by sails or by oars; and news was conveyed as it always had been conveyed. What improvements there had been had been in degree only and not in kind; and in some respects there had been retrogression rather than advance. There were many parts of Europe where the roads were certainly worse than the old Roman post-roads; and the Mediterranean Sea, for instance, was by no means as well policed as in the days of Trajan. Now steam and electricity have worked a complete revolution; and the resulting immensely increased ease of communication has in its turn completely changed all the physical questions of human life. A voyage from Egypt to England was nearly as serious an affair in the eighteenth century as in the second; and the news communications between the two lands were not materially improved. A graduate of your university to-day can go to mid-Asia or mid-Africa with far less consciousness of performing a feat of note than would have been the case a hundred years ago with a student who visited Sicily and Andalusia. Moreover, the invention and use of machinery run by steam or electricity have worked a revolution in industry as great as the revolution in transportation; so that here again the difference between ancient and modern civilization is one not merely of degree but of kind. In many vital respects the huge modern city differs more from all preceding cities than any of these differed one from the other; and the giant factory town is of and by itself one of the most formidable problems of modern life.

Steam and electricity have given the race dominion over land and water such as it never had before; and now the conquest of the air is directly impending. As books preserve thought through time, so the telegraph and the telephone transmit it through the space they annihilate, and therefore minds are swayed one by another without regard to the limitations of space and time which formerly forced each community to work in comparative isolation. It is the same with the body as with the brain. The machinery of the factory and the farm enormously multiplies bodily skill and vigor. Countless trained intelligences are at work to teach us how to avoid or counteract the effects of waste. Of course some of the agents in the modern scientific development of natural resources deal with resources of such a kind that their development means their destruction, so that exploitation on a grand scale means an intense rapidity of development purchased at the cost of a speedy exhaustion. The enormous and constantly increasing output of coal and iron necessarily means the approach of the day when our children’s children, or their children’s children, shall dwell in an ironless age—and, later on, in an age without coal—and will have to try to invent or develop new sources for the production of heat and use of energy. But as regards many another natural resource, scientific civilization teaches us how to preserve it through use. The best use of field and forest will leave them decade by decade, century by century, more fruitful; and we have barely begun to use the indestructible power that comes from harnessed water. The conquests of surgery, of medicine, the conquests in the entire field of hygiene and sanitation, have been literally marvellous; the advances in the past century or two have been over more ground than was covered during the entire previous history of the human race.

The advances in the realm of pure intellect have been of equal note, and they have been both intensive and extensive. Great virgin fields of learning and wisdom have been discovered by the few, and at the same time knowledge has spread among the many to a degree never dreamed of before. Old men among us have seen in their own generation the rise of the first rational science of the evolution of life. The astronomer and the chemist, the psychologist and the historian, and all their brethren in many different fields of wide endeavor, work with a training and knowledge and method which are in effect instruments of precision, differentiating their labors from the labors of their predecessors as the rifle is differentiated from the bow.

The play of new forces is as evident in the moral and spiritual world as in the world of the mind and the body. Forces for good and forces for evil are everywhere evident, each acting with a hundred- or a thousandfold the intensity with which it acted in former ages. Over the whole earth the swing of the pendulum grows more and more rapid, the mainspring coils and spreads at a rate constantly quickening, the whole world movement is of constantly accelerating velocity.

In this movement there are signs of much that bodes ill. The machinery is so highly geared, the tension and strain are so great, the effort and the output have alike so increased, that there is cause to dread the ruin that would come from any great accident, from any breakdown, and also the ruin that may come from the mere wearing out of the machine itself. The only previous civilization with which our modern civilization can be in any way compared is that period of Greco-Roman civilization extending, say, from the Athens of Themistocles to the Rome of Marcus Aurelius. Many of the forces and tendencies which were then at work are at work now. Knowledge, luxury, and refinement, wide material conquests, territorial administration on a vast scale, an increase in the mastery of mechanical appliances and in applied science—all these mark our civilization as they marked the wonderful civilization that flourished in the Mediterranean lands twenty centuries ago; and they preceded the downfall of the older civilization. Yet the differences are many, and some of them are quite as striking as the similarities. The single fact that the old civilization was based upon slavery shows the chasm that separates the two. Let me point out one further and very significant difference in the development of the two civilizations, a difference so obvious that it is astonishing that it has not been dwelt upon by men of letters.

One of the prime dangers of civilization has always been its tendency to cause the loss of virile fighting virtues, of the fighting edge. When men get too comfortable and lead too luxurious lives, there is always danger lest the softness eat like an acid into their manliness of fibre. The barbarian, because of the very conditions of his life, is forced to keep and develop certain hardy qualities which the man of civilization tends to lose, whether he be clerk, factory hand, merchant, or even a certain type of farmer. Now, I will not assert that in modern civilized society these tendencies have been wholly overcome; but there has been a much more successful effort to overcome them than was the case in the early civilizations. This is curiously shown by the military history of the Greco-Roman period as compared with the history of the last four or five centuries here in Europe and among nations of European descent. In the Grecian and Roman military history the change was steadily from a citizen army to an army of mercenaries. In the days of the early greatness of Athens, Thebes, and Sparta, in the days when the Roman republic conquered what world it knew, the armies were filled with citizen soldiers. But gradually the citizens refused to serve in the armies, or became unable to render good service. The Greek states described by Polybius, with but few exceptions, hired others to do their fighting for them. The Romans of the days of Augustus had utterly ceased to furnish any cavalry, and were rapidly ceasing to furnish any infantry, to the legions and cohorts. When the civilization came to an end, there were no longer citizens in the ranks of the soldiers. The change from the citizen army to the army of mercenaries had been completed.

Now the exact reverse has been the case with us in modern times. A few centuries ago the mercenary soldier was the principal figure in most armies, and in great numbers of cases the mercenary soldier was an alien. In the wars of religion in France, in the Thirty Years’ War in Germany, in the wars that immediately thereafter marked the beginning of the break-up of the great Polish kingdom, the regiments and brigades of foreign soldiers formed a striking and leading feature in every army. Too often the men of the country in which the fighting took place played merely the ignoble part of victims, the burghers and peasants appearing in but limited numbers in the mercenary armies by which they were plundered. Gradually this has all changed, until now practically every army is a citizen army, and the mercenary has almost disappeared, while the army exists on a vaster scale than ever before in history. This is so among the military monarchies of Europe. In our own Civil War of the United States the same thing occurred, peaceful people as we are. At that time more than two generations had passed since the war of independence. During the whole of that period the people had been engaged in no life-and-death struggle; and yet, when the Civil War broke out, and after some costly and bitter lessons at the beginning, the fighting spirit of the people was shown to better advantage than ever before. The war was peculiarly a war for a principle, a war waged by each side for an ideal, and while faults and shortcomings were plentiful among the combatants, there was comparatively little sordidness of motive or conduct. In such a giant struggle, where across the warp of so many interests is shot the woof of so many purposes, dark strands and bright, strands sombre and brilliant, are always intertwined; inevitably there was corruption here and there in the Civil War; but all the leaders on both sides and the great majority of the enormous masses of fighting men wholly disregarded, and were wholly uninfluenced by, pecuniary considerations. There were, of course, foreigners who came over to serve as soldiers of fortune for money or for love of adventure; but the foreign-born citizens served in much the same proportion, and from the same motives, as the native-born. Taken as a whole, it was, even more than the Revolutionary War, a true citizens’ fight, and the armies of Grant and Lee were as emphatically citizen armies as the Athenian, Theban, or Spartan armies in the great age of Greece, or as a Roman army in the days of the republic.

Another striking contrast in the course of modern civilization as compared with the later stages of the Greco-Roman or classic civilization is to be found in the relations of wealth and politics. In classic times, as the civilization advanced toward its zenith, politics became a recognized means of accumulating great wealth. Cæsar was again and again on the verge of bankruptcy; he spent an enormous fortune; and he recouped himself by the money which he made out of his political-military career. Augustus established imperial Rome on firm foundations by the use he made of the huge fortune he had acquired by plunder. What a contrast is offered by the careers of Washington and Lincoln! There were a few exceptions in ancient days; but the immense majority of the Greeks and the Romans, as their civilizations culminated, accepted money-making on a large scale as one of the incidents of a successful public career. Now all of this is in sharp contrast to what has happened within the last two or three centuries. During this time there has been a steady growth away from the theory that money-making is permissible in an honorable public career. In this respect the standard has been constantly elevated, and things which statesmen had no hesitation in doing three centuries or two centuries ago, and which did not seriously hurt a public career even a century ago, are now utterly impossible. Wealthy men still exercise a large, and sometimes an improper, influence in politics, but it is apt to be an indirect influence; and in the advanced states the mere suspicion that the wealth of public men is obtained or added to as an incident of their public careers will bar them from public life. Speaking generally, wealth may very greatly influence modern political life, but it is not acquired in political life. The colonial administrators, German or American, French or English, of this generation lead careers which, as compared with the careers of other men of like ability, show too little rather than too much regard for money-making; and literally a world scandal would be caused by conduct which a Roman proconsul would have regarded as moderate, and which would not have been especially uncommon even in the administration of England a century and a half ago. On the whole, the great statesmen of the last few generations have been either men of moderate means or, if men of wealth, men whose wealth was diminished rather than increased by their public services.

I have dwelt on these points merely because it is well to emphasize in the most emphatic fashion the fact that in many respects there is a complete lack of analogy between the civilization of to-day and the only other civilization in any way comparable to it, that of the ancient Greco-Roman lands. There are, of course, many points in which the analogy is close, and in some of these points the resemblances are as ominous as they are striking. But most striking of all is the fact that in point of physical extent, of wide diversity of interest, and of extreme velocity of movement, the present civilization can be compared to nothing that has ever gone before. It is now literally a world movement, and the movement is growing ever more rapid and is ever reaching into new fields. Any considerable influence exerted at one point is certain to be felt with greater or less effect at almost every other point. Every path of activity open to the human intellect is followed with an eagerness and success never hitherto dreamed of. We have established complete liberty of conscience, and, in consequence, a complete liberty for mental activity. All free and daring souls have before them a well-nigh limitless opening for endeavor of any kind.

Hitherto every civilization that has arisen has been able to develop only a comparatively few activities; that is, its field of endeavor has been limited in kind as well as in locality. There have, of course, been great movements, but they were of practically only one form of activity; and, although usually this set in motion other kinds of activities, such was not always the case. The great religious movements have been the preeminent examples of this type. But they are not the only ones. Such peoples as the Mongols and the Phœnicians, at almost opposite poles of cultivation, have represented movements in which one element, military or commercial, so overshadowed all other elements that the movement died out chiefly because it was one-sided. The extraordinary outburst of activity among the Mongols of the thirteenth century was almost purely a military movement, without even any great administrative side; and it was therefore well-nigh purely a movement of destruction. The individual prowess and hardihood of the Mongols, and the perfection of their military organization rendered their armies incomparably superior to those of any European, or any other Asiatic, power of that day. They conquered from the Yellow Sea to the Persian Gulf and the Adriatic; they seized the imperial throne of China; they slew the Caliph in Bagdad; they founded dynasties in India. The fanaticism of Christianity and the fanaticism of Mohammedanism were alike powerless against them. The valor of the bravest fighting men in Europe was impotent to check them. They trampled Russia into bloody mire beneath the hoofs of their horses; they drew red furrows of destruction across Poland and Hungary; they overthrew with ease any force from western Europe that dared encounter them. Yet they had no root of permanence; their work was mere evil while it lasted, and it did not last long; and when they vanished they left hardly a trace behind them. So the extraordinary Phœnician civilization was almost purely a mercantile, a business civilization, and though it left an impress on the life that came after, this impress was faint indeed compared to that left, for instance, by the Greeks with their many-sided development. Yet the Greek civilization itself fell because this many-sided development became too exclusively one of intellect, at the expense of character, at the expense of the fundamental qualities which fit men to govern both themselves and others. When the Greek lost the sterner virtues, when his soldiers lost the fighting edge, and his statesmen grew corrupt, while the people became a faction-torn and pleasure-loving rabble, then the doom of Greece was at hand, and not all their cultivation, their intellectual brilliancy, their artistic development, their adroitness in speculative science, could save the Hellenic peoples as they bowed before the sword of the iron Roman.

What is the lesson to us to-day? Are we to go the way of the older civilizations? The immense increase in the area of civilized activity to-day, so that it is nearly coterminous with the world’s surface; the immense increase in the multitudinous variety of its activities; the immense increase in the velocity of the world movement—are all these to mean merely that the crash will be all the more complete and terrible when it comes? We can not be certain that the answer will be in the negative; but of this we can be certain, that we shall not go down in ruin unless we deserve and earn our end. There is no necessity for us to fall; we can hew out our destiny for ourselves, if only we have the wit and the courage and the honesty.

Personally, I do not believe that our civilization will fall. I think that on the whole we have grown better and not worse. I think that on the whole the future holds more for us than even the great past has held. But, assuredly, the dreams of golden glory in the future will not come true unless, high of heart and strong of hand, by our own mighty deeds we make them come true. We can not afford to develop any one set of qualities, any one set of activities, at the cost of seeing others, equally necessary, atrophied. Neither the military efficiency of the Mongol, the extraordinary business ability of the Phœnician, nor the subtle and polished intellect of the Greek availed to avert destruction.

We, the men of to-day and of the future, need many qualities if we are to do our work well. We need, first of all and most important of all, the qualities which stand at the base of individual, of family life, the fundamental and essential qualities—the homely, every-day, all-important virtues. If the average man will not work, if he has not in him the will and the power to be a good husband and father; if the average woman is not a good housewife, a good mother of many healthy children, then the state will topple, will go down, no matter what may be its brilliance of artistic development or material achievement. But these homely qualities are not enough. There must, in addition, be that power of organization, that power of working in common for a common end, which the German people have shown in such signal fashion during the last half-century. Moreover, the things of the spirit are even more important than the things of the body. We can well do without the hard intolerance and arid intellectual barrenness of what was worst in the theological systems of the past, but there has never been greater need of a high and fine religious spirit than at the present time. So, while we can laugh good-humoredly at some of the pretensions of modern philosophy in its various branches, it would be worse than folly on our part to ignore our need of intellectual leadership. Your own great Frederick once said that if he wished to punish a province he would leave it to be governed by philosophers; the sneer had in it an element of justice; and yet no one better than the great Frederick knew the value of philosophers, the value of men of science, men of letters, men of art. It would be a bad thing indeed to accept Tolstoi as a guide in social and moral matters; but it would also be a bad thing not to have Tolstoi, not to profit by the lofty side of his teachings. There are plenty of scientific men whose hard arrogance, whose cynical materialism, whose dogmatic intolerance, put them on a level with the bigoted mediæval ecclesiasticism which they denounce. Yet our debt to scientific men is incalculable, and our civilization of to-day would have reft from it all that which most highly distinguishes it if the work of the great masters of science during the past four centuries were now undone or forgotten. Never has philanthropy, humanitarianism, seen such development as now; and though we must all beware of the folly, and the viciousness no worse than folly, which marks the believer in the perfectibility of man when his heart runs away with his head, or when vanity usurps the place of conscience, yet we must remember also that it is only by working along the lines laid down by the philanthropists, by the lovers of mankind, that we can be sure of lifting our civilization to a higher and more permanent plane of well-being than was ever attained by any preceding civilization. Unjust war is to be abhorred; but woe to the nation that does not make ready to hold its own in time of need against all who would harm it! And woe thrice over to the nation in which the average man loses the fighting edge, loses the power to serve as a soldier if the day of need should arise!

It is no impossible dream to build up a civilization in which morality, ethical development, and a true feeling of brotherhood shall all alike be divorced from false sentimentality, and from the rancorous and evil passions which, curiously enough, so often accompany professions of sentimental attachment to the rights of man; in which a high material development in the things of the body shall be achieved without subordination of the things of the soul; in which there shall be a genuine desire for peace and justice without loss of those virile qualities without which no love of peace or justice shall avail any race; in which the fullest development of scientific research, the great distinguishing feature of our present civilization, shall yet not imply a belief that intellect can ever take the place of character—for, from the standpoint of the nation as of the individual, it is character that is the one vital possession.

Finally, this world movement of civilization, this movement which is now felt throbbing in every corner of the globe, should bind the nations of the world together while yet leaving unimpaired that love of country in the individual citizen which in the present stage of the world’s progress is essential to the world’s well-being. You, my hearers, and I who speak to you, belong to different nations. Under modern conditions the books we read, the news sent by telegraph to our newspapers, the strangers we meet, half of the things we hear and do each day, all tend to bring us into touch with other peoples. Each people can do justice to itself only if it does justice to others; but each people can do its part in the world movement for all only if it first does its duty within its own household. The good citizen must be a good citizen of his own country first before he can with advantage be a citizen of the world at large. I wish you well. I believe in you and your future. I admire and wonder at the extraordinary greatness and variety of your achievements in so many and such widely different fields; and my admiration and regard are all the greater, and not the less, because I am so profound a believer in the institutions and the people of my own land.

CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC

CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC4

Strange and impressive associations rise in the mind of a man from the New World who speaks before this august body in this ancient institution of learning. Before his eyes pass the shadows of mighty kings and warlike nobles, of great masters of law and theology; through the shining dust of the dead centuries he sees crowded figures that tell of the power and learning and splendor of times gone by; and he sees also the innumerable host of humble students to whom clerkship meant emancipation, to whom it was well-nigh the only outlet from the dark thraldom of the Middle Ages.

4 Delivered at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910.

This was the most famous university of mediæval Europe at a time when no one dreamed that there was a New World to discover. Its services to the cause of human knowledge already stretched far back into the remote past at the time when my forefathers, three centuries ago, were among the sparse bands of traders, ploughmen, wood-choppers, and fisherfolk who, in hard struggle with the iron unfriendliness of the Indian-haunted land, were laying the foundations of what has now become the giant republic of the West. To conquer a continent, to tame the shaggy roughness of wild nature, means grim warfare; and the generations engaged in it can not keep, still less add to, the stores of garnered wisdom which once were theirs, and which are still in the hands of their brethren who dwell in the old land. To conquer the wilderness means to wrest victory from the same hostile forces with which mankind struggled in the immemorial infancy of our race. The primeval conditions must be met by primeval qualities which are incompatible with the retention of much that has been painfully acquired by humanity as through the ages it has striven upward toward civilization. In conditions so primitive there can be but a primitive culture. At first only the rudest schools can be established, for no others would meet the needs of the hard-driven, sinewy folk who thrust forward the frontier in the teeth of savage man and savage nature; and many years elapse before any of these schools can develop into seats of higher learning and broader culture.

The pioneer days pass; the stump-dotted clearings expand into vast stretches of fertile farmland; the stockaded clusters of log cabins change into towns; the hunters of game, the fellers of trees, the rude frontier traders and tillers of the soil, the men who wander all their lives long through the wilderness as the heralds and harbingers of an oncoming civilization, themselves vanish before the civilization for which they have prepared the way. The children of their successors and supplanters, and then their children and children’s children, change and develop with extraordinary rapidity. The conditions accentuate vices and virtues, energy and ruthlessness, all the good qualities and all the defects of an intense individualism, self-reliant, self-centred, far more conscious of its rights than of its duties, and blind to its own shortcomings. To the hard materialism of the frontier days succeeds the hard materialism of an industrialism even more intense and absorbing than that of the older nations; although these themselves have likewise already entered on the age of a complex and predominantly industrial civilization.

As the country grows, its people, who have won success in so many lines, turn back to try to recover the possessions of the mind and the spirit, which perforce their fathers threw aside in order better to wage the first rough battles for the continent their children inherit. The leaders of thought and of action grope their way forward to a new life, realizing, sometimes dimly, sometimes clear-sightedly, that the life of material gain, whether for a nation or an individual, is of value only as a foundation, only as there is added to it the uplift that comes from devotion to loftier ideals. The new life thus sought can in part be developed afresh from what is round about in the New World; but it can be developed in full only by freely drawing upon the treasure-houses of the Old World, upon the treasures stored in the ancient abodes of wisdom and learning, such as this where I speak to-day. It is a mistake for any nation merely to copy another; but it is an even greater mistake, it is a proof of weakness in any nation, not to be anxious to learn from another, and willing and able to adapt that learning to the new national conditions and make it fruitful and productive therein. It is for us of the New World to sit at the feet of the Gamaliel of the Old; then, if we have the right stuff in us, we can show that Paul in his turn can become a teacher as well as a scholar.

To-day I shall speak to you on the subject of individual citizenship, the one subject of vital importance to you, my hearers, and to me and my countrymen, because you and we are citizens of great democratic republics. A democratic republic such as each of ours—an effort to realize in its full sense government by, of, and for the people—represents the most gigantic of all possible social experiments, the one fraught with greatest possibilities alike for good and for evil. The success of republics like yours and like ours means the glory, and our failure the despair, of mankind; and for you and for us the question of the quality of the individual citizen is supreme. Under other forms of government, under the rule of one man or of a very few men, the quality of the rulers is all-important. If, under such governments, the quality of the rulers is high enough, then the nation may for generations lead a brilliant career, and add substantially to the sum of world achievement, no matter how low the quality of the average citizen; because the average citizen is an almost negligible quantity in working out the final results of that type of national greatness.

But with you and with us the case is different. With you here, and with us in my own home, in the long run, success or failure will be conditioned upon the way in which the average man, the average woman, does his or her duty, first in the ordinary, every-day affairs of life, and next in those great occasional crises which call for the heroic virtues. The average citizen must be a good citizen if our republics are to succeed. The stream will not permanently rise higher than the main source; and the main source of national power and national greatness is found in the average citizenship of the nation. Therefore it behooves us to do our best to see that the standard of the average citizen is kept high; and the average can not be kept high unless the standard of the leaders is very much higher.

It is well if a large proportion of the leaders in any republic, in any democracy, are, as a matter of course, drawn from the classes represented in this audience to-day; but only provided that those classes possess the gifts of sympathy with plain people and of devotion to great ideals. You and those like you have received special advantages; you have all of you had the opportunity for mental training; many of you have had leisure; most of you have had a chance for the enjoyment of life far greater than comes to the majority of your fellows. To you and your kind much has been given, and from you much should be expected. Yet there are certain failings against which it is especially incumbent that both men of trained and cultivated intellect, and men of inherited wealth and position, should especially guard themselves, because to these failings they are especially liable; and if yielded to, their—your—chances of useful service are at an end.

Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, beware of that queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself and to others as the cynic, as the man who has outgrown emotions and beliefs, the man to whom good and evil are as one. The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes second to achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life’s realities—all these are marks, not, as the possessor would fain think, of superiority, but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part manfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affectation of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves their own weakness. The rôle is easy; there is none easier, save only the rôle of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into a fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride or slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not what they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of the great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder. Well for these men if they succeed; well also, though not so well, if they fail, given only that they have nobly ventured, and have put forth all their heart and strength. It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard fighting, he of the many errors and the valiant end, over whose memory we love to linger, not over the memory of the young lord who “but for the vile guns would have been a soldier.”

France has taught many lessons to other nations: surely one of the most important is the lesson her whole history teaches, that a high artistic and literary development is compatible with notable leadership in arms and statecraft. The brilliant gallantry of the French soldier has for many centuries been proverbial; and during these same centuries at every court in Europe the “freemasons of fashion” have treated the French tongue as their common speech; while every artist and man of letters, and every man of science able to appreciate that marvellous instrument of precision, French prose, has turned toward France for aid and inspiration. How long the leadership in arms and letters has lasted is curiously illustrated by the fact that the earliest masterpiece in a modern tongue is the splendid French epic which tells of Roland’s doom and the vengeance of Charlemagne when the lords of the Frankish host were stricken at Roncesvalles.

Let those who have, keep, let those who have not, strive to attain, a high standard of cultivation and scholarship. Yet let us remember that these stand second to certain other things. There is need of a sound body, and even more need of a sound mind. But above mind and above body stands character—the sum of those qualities which we mean when we speak of a man’s force and courage, of his good faith and sense of honor. I believe in exercise for the body, always provided that we keep in mind that physical development is a means and not an end. I believe, of course, in giving to all the people a good education. But the education must contain much besides book-learning in order to be really good. We must ever remember that no keenness and subtleness of intellect, no polish, no cleverness, in any way make up for the lack of the great solid qualities. Self-restraint, self-mastery, common sense, the power of accepting individual responsibility and yet of acting in conjunction with others, courage and resolution—these are the qualities which mark a masterful people. Without them no people can control itself, or save itself from being controlled from the outside. I speak to a brilliant assemblage; I speak in a great university which represents the flower of the highest intellectual development; I pay all homage to intellect, and to elaborate and specialized training of the intellect; and yet I know I shall have the assent of all of you present when I add that more important still are the commonplace, every-day qualities and virtues.

Such ordinary, every-day qualities include the will and the power to work, to fight at need, and to have plenty of healthy children. The need that the average man shall work is so obvious as hardly to warrant insistence. There are a few people in every country so born that they can lead lives of leisure. These fill a useful function if they make it evident that leisure does not mean idleness; for some of the most valuable work needed by civilization is essentially non-remunerative in its character, and of course the people who do this work should in large part be drawn from those to whom remuneration is an object of indifference. But the average man must earn his own livelihood. He should be trained to do so, and he should be trained to feel that he occupies a contemptible position if he does not do so; that he is not an object of envy if he is idle, at whichever end of the social scale he stands, but an object of contempt, an object of derision.

In the next place, the good man should be both a strong and a brave man; that is, he should be able to fight, he should be able to serve his country as a soldier, if the need arises. There are well-meaning philosophers who declaim against the unrighteousness of war. They are right only if they lay all their emphasis upon the unrighteousness. War is a dreadful thing, and unjust war is a crime against humanity. But it is such a crime because it is unjust, not because it is war. The choice must ever be in favor of righteousness, and this whether the alternative be peace or whether the alternative be war. The question must not be merely, Is there to be peace or war? The question must be, Is the right to prevail? Are the great laws of righteousness once more to be fulfilled? And the answer from a strong and virile people must be, “Yes,” whatever the cost. Every honorable effort should always be made to avoid war, just as every honorable effort should always be made by the individual in private life to keep out of a brawl, to keep out of trouble; but no self-respecting individual, no self-respecting nation, can or ought to submit to wrong.

Finally, even more important than ability to work, even more important than ability to fight at need, is it to remember that the chief of blessings for any nation is that it shall leave its seed to inherit the land. It was the crown of blessings in Biblical times; and it is the crown of blessings now. The greatest of all curses is the curse of sterility, and the severest of all condemnations should be that visited upon wilful sterility. The first essential in any civilization is that the man and the woman shall be father and mother of healthy children, so that the race shall increase and not decrease. If this is not so, if through no fault of the society there is failure to increase, it is a great misfortune. If the failure is due to deliberate and wilful fault, then it is not merely a misfortune, it is one of those crimes of ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk, which in the long run Nature punishes more heavily than any other. If we of the great republics, if we, the free people who claim to have emancipated ourselves from the thraldom of wrong and error, bring down on our heads the curse that comes upon the wilfully barren, then it will be an idle waste of breath to prattle of our achievements, to boast of all that we have done. No refinement of life, no delicacy of taste, no material progress, no sordid heaping up of riches, no sensuous development of art and literature, can in any way compensate for the loss of the great fundamental virtues; and of these great fundamental virtues the greatest is the race’s power to perpetuate the race.

Character must show itself in the man’s performance both of the duty he owes himself and of the duty he owes the state. The man’s foremost duty is owed to himself and his family; and he can do this duty only by earning money, by providing what is essential to material well-being; it is only after this has been done that he can hope to build a higher superstructure on the solid material foundation; it is only after this has been done that he can help in movements for the general well-being. He must pull his own weight first, and only after this can his surplus strength be of use to the general public. It is not good to excite that bitter laughter which expresses contempt; and contempt is what we feel for the being whose enthusiasm to benefit mankind is such that he is a burden to those nearest him; who wishes to do great things for humanity in the abstract, but who can not keep his wife in comfort or educate his children.

Nevertheless, while laying all stress on this point, while not merely acknowledging but insisting upon the fact that there must be a basis of material well-being for the individual as for the nation, let us with equal emphasis insist that this material well-being represents nothing but the foundation, and that the foundation, though indispensable, is worthless unless upon it is raised the superstructure of a higher life. That is why I decline to recognize the mere multimillionaire, the man of mere wealth, as an asset of value to any country; and especially as not an asset to my own country. If he has earned or uses his wealth in a way that makes him of real benefit, of real use—and such is often the case—why, then he does become an asset of worth. But it is the way in which it has been earned or used, and not the mere fact of wealth, that entitles him to the credit. There is need in business, as in most other forms of human activity, of the great guiding intelligences. Their places can not be supplied by any number of lesser intelligences. It is a good thing that they should have ample recognition, ample reward. But we must not transfer our admiration to the reward instead of to the deed rewarded; and if what should be the reward exists without the service having been rendered, then admiration will come only from those who are mean of soul. The truth is that, after a certain measure of tangible material success or reward has been achieved, the question of increasing it becomes of constantly less importance compared to other things that can be done in life. It is a bad thing for a nation to raise and to admire a false standard of success; and there can be no falser standard than that set by the deification of material well-being in and for itself. The man who, for any cause for which he is himself accountable, has failed to support himself and those for whom he is responsible, ought to feel that he has fallen lamentably short in his prime duty. But the man who, having far surpassed the limit of providing for the wants, both of body and mind, of himself and of those depending upon him, then piles up a great fortune, for the acquisition or retention of which he returns no corresponding benefit to the nation as a whole, should himself be made to feel that, so far from being a desirable, he is an unworthy, citizen of the community; that he is to be neither admired nor envied; that his right-thinking fellow countrymen put him low in the scale of citizenship, and leave him to be consoled by the admiration of those whose level of purpose is even lower than his own.

My position as regards the moneyed interests can be put in a few words. In every civilized society property rights must be carefully safeguarded; ordinarily, and in the great majority of cases, human rights and property rights are fundamentally and in the long run identical; but when it clearly appears that there is a real conflict between them, human rights must have the upper hand, for property belongs to man and not man to property.

In fact, it is essential to good citizenship clearly to understand that there are certain qualities which we in a democracy are prone to admire in and of themselves, which ought by rights to be judged admirable or the reverse solely from the standpoint of the use made of them. Foremost among these I should include two very distinct gifts—the gift of money-making and the gift of oratory. Money-making, the money touch, I have spoken of above. It is a quality which in a moderate degree is essential. It may be useful when developed to a very great degree, but only if accompanied and controlled by other qualities; and without such control the possessor tends to develop into one of the least attractive types produced by a modern industrial democracy. So it is with the orator. It is highly desirable that a leader of opinion in a democracy should be able to state his views clearly and convincingly. But all that the oratory can do of value to the community is to enable the man thus to explain himself; if it enables the orator to persuade his hearers to put false values on things, it merely makes him a power for mischief. Some excellent public servants have not the gift at all, and must rely upon their deeds to speak for them; and unless the oratory does represent genuine conviction based on good common sense and able to be translated into efficient performance, then the better the oratory the greater the damage to the public it deceives. Indeed, it is a sign of marked political weakness in any commonwealth if the people tend to be carried away by mere oratory, if they tend to value words in and for themselves, as divorced from the deeds for which they are supposed to stand. The phrase-maker, the phrase-monger, the ready talker, however great his power, whose speech does not make for courage, sobriety, and right understanding, is simply a noxious element in the body politic, and it speaks ill for the public if he has influence over them. To admire the gift of oratory without regard to the moral quality behind the gift is to do wrong to the republic.

Of course all that I say of the orator applies with even greater force to the orator’s latter-day and more influential brother, the journalist. The power of the journalist is great, but he is entitled neither to respect nor admiration because of that power unless it is used aright. He can do, and he often does, great good. He can do, and he often does, infinite mischief. All journalists, all writers, for the very reason that they appreciate the vast possibilities of their profession, should bear testimony against those who deeply discredit it. Offences against taste and morals, which are bad enough in a private citizen, are infinitely worse if made into instruments for debauching the community through a newspaper. Mendacity, slander, sensationalism, inanity, vapid triviality, all are potent factors for the debauchery of the public mind and conscience. The excuse advanced for vicious writing, that the public demands it and that the demand must be supplied, can no more be admitted than if it were advanced by the purveyors of food who sell poisonous adulterations.

In short, the good citizen in a republic must realize that he ought to possess two sets of qualities, and that neither avails without the other. He must have those qualities which make for efficiency; and he must also have those qualities which direct the efficiency into channels for the public good. He is useless if he is inefficient. There is nothing to be done with that type of citizen of whom all that can be said is that he is harmless. Virtue which is dependent upon a sluggish circulation is not impressive. There is little place in active life for the timid good man. The man who is saved by weakness from robust wickedness is likewise rendered immune from the robuster virtues. The good citizen in a republic must first of all be able to hold his own. He is no good citizen unless he has the ability which will make him work hard and which at need will make him fight hard. The good citizen is not a good citizen unless he is an efficient citizen.

But if a man’s efficiency is not guided and regulated by a moral sense, then the more efficient he is the worse he is, the more dangerous to the body politic. Courage, intellect, all the masterful qualities, serve but to make a man more evil if they are used merely for that man’s own advancement, with brutal indifference to the rights of others. It speaks ill for the community if the community worships these qualities and treats their possessors as heroes regardless of whether the qualities are used rightly or wrongly. It makes no difference as to the precise way in which this sinister efficiency is shown. It makes no difference whether such a man’s force and ability betray themselves in the career of money-maker or politician, soldier or orator, journalist or popular leader. If the man works for evil, then the more successful he is the more he should be despised and condemned by all upright and farseeing men. To judge a man merely by success is an abhorrent wrong; and if the people at large habitually so judge men, if they grow to condone wickedness because the wicked man triumphs, they show their inability to understand that in the last analysis free institutions rest upon the character of citizenship, and that by such admiration of evil they prove themselves unfit for liberty.

The homely virtues of the household, the ordinary workaday virtues which make the woman a good housewife and housemother, which make the man a hard worker, a good husband and father, a good soldier at need, stand at the bottom of character. But of course many others must be added thereto if a state is to be not only free but great. Good citizenship is not good citizenship if exhibited only in the home. There remain the duties of the individual in relation to the state, and these duties are none too easy under the conditions which exist where the effort is made to carry on free government in a complex, industrial civilization. Perhaps the most important thing the ordinary citizen, and, above all, the leader of ordinary citizens, has to remember in political life is that he must not be a sheer doctrinaire. The closet philosopher, the refined and cultured individual who from his library tells how men ought to be governed under ideal conditions, is of no use in actual governmental work; and the one-sided fanatic, and still more the mob-leader, and the insincere man who to achieve power promises what by no possibility can be performed, are not merely useless but noxious.

The citizen must have high ideals, and yet he must be able to achieve them in practical fashion. No permanent good comes from aspirations so lofty that they have grown fantastic and have become impossible and indeed undesirable to realize. The impracticable visionary is far less often the guide and precursor than he is the imbittered foe of the real reformer, of the man who, with stumblings and shortcomings, yet does in some shape, in practical fashion, give effect to the hopes and desires of those who strive for better things. Woe to the empty phrase-maker, to the empty idealist, who, instead of making ready the ground for the man of action, turns against him when he appears and hampers him as he does the work! Moreover, the preacher of ideals must remember how sorry and contemptible is the figure which he will cut, how great the damage that he will do, if he does not himself, in his own life, strive measurably to realize the ideals that he preaches for others. Let him remember also that the worth of the ideal must be largely determined by the success with which it can in practice be realized. We should abhor the so-called “practical” men whose practicality assumes the shape of that peculiar baseness which finds its expression in disbelief in morality and decency, in disregard of high standards of living and conduct. Such a creature is the worst enemy of the body politic. But only less desirable as a citizen is his nominal opponent and real ally, the man of fantastic vision who makes the impossible better forever the enemy of the possible good.

We can just as little afford to follow the doctrinaires of an extreme individualism as the doctrinaires of an extreme socialism. Individual initiative, so far from being discouraged, should be stimulated; and yet we should remember that, as society develops and grows more complex, we continually find that things which once it was desirable to leave to individual initiative can, under the changed conditions, be performed with better results by common effort. It is quite impossible, and equally undesirable, to draw in theory a hard-and-fast line which shall always divide the two sets of cases. This every one who is not cursed with the pride of the closet philosopher will see, if he will only take the trouble to think about some of our commonest phenomena. For instance, when people live on isolated farms or in little hamlets, each house can be left to attend to its own drainage and water supply; but the mere multiplication of families in a given area produces new problems which, because they differ in size, are found to differ not only in degree but in kind from the old; and the questions of drainage and water supply have to be considered from the common standpoint. It is not a matter for abstract dogmatizing to decide when this point is reached; it is a matter to be tested by practical experiment. Much of the discussion about socialism and individualism is entirely pointless, because of failure to agree on terminology. It is not good to be the slave of names. I am a strong individualist by personal habit, inheritance, and conviction; but it is a mere matter of common sense to recognize that the state, the community, the citizens acting together, can do a number of things better than if they were left to individual action. The individualism which finds its expression in the abuse of physical force is checked very early in the growth of civilization, and we of to-day should in our turn strive to shackle or destroy that individualism which triumphs by greed and cunning, which exploits the weak by craft instead of ruling them by brutality. We ought to go with any man in the effort to bring about justice and the equality of opportunity, to turn the tool-user more and more into the tool-owner, to shift burdens so that they can be more equitably borne. The deadening effect on any race of the adoption of a logical and extreme socialistic system could not be overstated; it would spell sheer destruction; it would produce grosser wrong and outrage, fouler immorality, than any existing system. But this does not mean that we may not with great advantage adopt certain of the principles professed by some given set of men who happen to call themselves Socialists; to be afraid to do so would be to make a mark of weakness on our part.

But we should not take part in acting a lie any more than in telling a lie. We should not say that men are equal where they are not equal, nor proceed upon the assumption that there is an equality where it does not exist; but we should strive to bring about a measurable equality, at least to the extent of preventing the inequality which is due to force or fraud. Abraham Lincoln, a man of the plain people, blood of their blood and bone of their bone, who all his life toiled and wrought and suffered for them, and at the end died for them, who always strove to represent them, who would never tell an untruth to or for them, spoke of the doctrine of equality with his usual mixture of idealism and sound common sense. He said (I omit what was of merely local significance):

“I think the authors of the Declaration of Independence intended to include all men, but that they did not mean to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all men were equal in color, size, intellect, moral development, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what they did consider all men created equal—equal in certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This they said, and this they meant. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth that all were then actually enjoying that equality, or yet that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all—constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and, even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people, everywhere.”

We are bound in honor to refuse to listen to those men who would make us desist from the effort to do away with the inequality which means injustice; the inequality of right, of opportunity, of privilege. We are bound in honor to strive to bring ever nearer the day when, as far as is humanly possible, we shall be able to realize the ideal that each man shall have an equal opportunity to show the stuff that is in him by the way in which he renders service. There should, so far as possible, be equality of opportunity to render service; but just so long as there is inequality of service there should and must be inequality of reward. We may be sorry for the general, the painter, the artist, the worker in any profession or of any kind, whose misfortune rather than whose fault it is that he does his work ill. But the reward must go to the man who does his work well; for any other course is to create a new kind of privilege, the privilege of folly and weakness; and special privilege is injustice, whatever form it takes.

To say that the thriftless, the lazy, the vicious, the incapable, ought to have the reward given to those who are far-sighted, capable, and upright, is to say what is not true and can not be true. Let us try to level up, but let us beware of the evil of levelling down. If a man stumbles, it is a good thing to help him to his feet. Every one of us needs a helping hand now and then. But if a man lies down, it is a waste of time to try to carry him; and it is a very bad thing for every one if we make men feel that the same reward will come to those who shirk their work and to those who do it.

Let us, then, take into account the actual facts of life, and not be misled into following any proposal for achieving the millennium, for re-creating the golden age, until we have subjected it to hardheaded examination. On the other hand, it is foolish to reject a proposal merely because it is advanced by visionaries. If a given scheme is proposed, look at it on its merits, and, in considering it, disregard formulas. It does not matter in the least who proposes it, or why. If it seems good, try it. If it proves good, accept it; otherwise reject it. There are plenty of men calling themselves Socialists with whom, up to a certain point, it is quite possible to work. If the next step is one which both we and they wish to take, why of course take it, without any regard to the fact that our views as to the tenth step may differ. But, on the other hand, keep clearly in mind that, though it has been worth while to take one step, this does not in the least mean that it may not be highly disadvantageous to take the next. It is just as foolish to refuse all progress because people demanding it desire at some points to go to absurd extremes, as it would be to go to these absurd extremes simply because some of the measures advocated by the extremists were wise.

The good citizen will demand liberty for himself, and as a matter of pride he will see to it that others receive the liberty which he thus claims as his own. Probably the best test of true love of liberty in any country is the way in which minorities are treated in that country. Not only should there be complete liberty in matters of religion and opinion, but complete liberty for each man to lead his life as he desires, provided only that in so doing he does not wrong his neighbor. Persecution is bad because it is persecution, and without reference to which side happens at the moment to be the persecutor and which the persecuted. Class hatred is bad in just the same way, and without any regard to the individual who, at a given time, substitutes loyalty to a class for loyalty to the nation, or substitutes hatred of men because they happen to come in a certain social category, for judgment awarded them according to their conduct. Remember always that the same measure of condemnation should be extended to the arrogance which would look down upon or crush any man because he is poor and to the envy and hatred which would destroy a man because he is wealthy. The overbearing brutality of the man of wealth or power, and the envious and hateful malice directed against wealth or power, are really at root merely different manifestations of the same quality, merely the two sides of the same shield. The man who, if born to wealth and power, exploits and ruins his less fortunate brethren is at heart the same as the greedy and violent demagogue who excites those who have not property to plunder those who have. The gravest wrong upon his country is inflicted by that man, whatever his station, who seeks to make his countrymen divide primarily on the line that separates class from class, occupation from occupation, men of more wealth from men of less wealth, instead of remembering that the only safe standard is that which judges each man on his worth as a man, whether he be rich or poor, without regard to his profession or to his station in life. Such is the only true democratic test, the only test that can with propriety be applied in a republic. There have been many republics in the past, both in what we call antiquity and in what we call the Middle Ages. They fell, and the prime factor in their fall was the fact that the parties tended to divide along the line that separates wealth from poverty. It made no difference which side was successful; it made no difference whether the republic fell under the rule of an oligarchy or the rule of a mob. In either case, when once loyalty to a class had been substituted for loyalty to the republic, the end of the republic was at hand. There is no greater need to-day than the need to keep ever in mind the fact that the cleavage between right and wrong, between good citizenship and bad citizenship, runs at right angles to, and not parallel with, the lines of cleavage between class and class, between occupation and occupation. Ruin looks us in the face if we judge a man by his position instead of judging him by his conduct in that position.

In a republic, to be successful we must learn to combine intensity of conviction with a broad tolerance of difference of conviction. Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not to be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth. Bitter internecine hatreds, based on such differences, are signs, not of earnestness of belief, but of that fanaticism which, whether religious or anti-religious, democratic or anti-democratic, is itself but a manifestation of the gloomy bigotry which has been the chief factor in the downfall of so many, many nations.

Of one man in especial, beyond any one else, the citizens of a republic should beware, and that is of the man who appeals to them to support him on the ground that he is hostile to other citizens of the republic, that he will secure for those who elect him, in one shape or another, profit at the expense of other citizens of the republic. It makes no difference whether he appeals to class hatred or class interest, to religious or anti-religious prejudice. The man who makes such an appeal should always be presumed to make it for the sake of furthering his own interest. The very last thing that an intelligent and self-respecting member of a democratic community should do is to reward any public man because that public man says he will get the private citizen something to which this private citizen is not entitled, or will gratify some emotion or animosity which this private citizen ought not to possess. Let me illustrate this by one anecdote from my own experience. A number of years ago I was engaged in cattle-ranching on the great plains of the western United States. There were no fences. The cattle wandered free, the ownership of each being determined by the brand; the calves were branded with the brand of the cows they followed. If on the round-up an animal was passed by, the following year it would appear as an unbranded yearling, and was then called a maverick. By the custom of the country these mavericks were branded with the brand of the man on whose range they were found. One day I was riding the range with a newly hired cowboy, and we came upon a maverick. We roped and threw it; then we built a little fire, took out a cinch-ring, heated it at the fire; and the cowboy started to put on the brand. I said to him, “It is So-and-so’s brand,” naming the man on whose range we happened to be. He answered: “That’s all right, boss; I know my business.” In another moment I said to him: “Hold on, you are putting on my brand!” To which he answered: “That’s all right; I always put on the boss’s brand.” I answered: “Oh, very well. Now you go straight back to the ranch and get what is owing to you; I don’t need you any longer.” He jumped up and said: “Why, what’s the matter? I was putting on your brand.” And I answered: “Yes, my friend, and if you will steal for me you will steal from me.”

Now, the same principle which applies in private life applies also in public life. If a public man tries to get your vote by saying that he will do something wrong in your interest, you can be absolutely certain that if ever it becomes worth his while he will do something wrong against your interest.

So much for the citizenship of the individual in his relations to his family, to his neighbor, to the state. There remain duties of citizenship which the state, the aggregation of all the individuals, owes in connection with other states, with other nations. Let me say at once that I am no advocate of a foolish cosmopolitanism. I believe that a man must be a good patriot before he can be, and as the only possible way of being, a good citizen of the world. Experience teaches us that the average man who protests that his international feeling swamps his national feeling, that he does not care for his country because he cares so much for mankind, in actual practice proves himself the foe of mankind; that the man who says that he does not care to be a citizen of any one country, because he is a citizen of the world, is in very fact usually an exceedingly undesirable citizen of whatever corner of the world he happens at the moment to be in. In the dim future all moral needs and moral standards may change; but at present, if a man can view his own country and all other countries from the same level with tepid indifference, it is wise to distrust him, just as it is wise to distrust the man who can take the same dispassionate view of his wife and his mother. However broad and deep a man’s sympathies, however intense his activities, he need have no fear that they will be cramped by love of his native land.

Now, this does not mean in the least that a man should not wish to do good outside of his native land. On the contrary, just as I think that the man who loves his family is more apt to be a good neighbor than the man who does not, so I think that the most useful member of the family of nations is normally a strongly patriotic nation. So far from patriotism being inconsistent with a proper regard for the rights of other nations, I hold that the true patriot, who is as jealous of the national honor as a gentleman is of his own honor, will be careful to see that the nation neither inflicts nor suffers wrong, just as a gentleman scorns equally to wrong others or to suffer others to wrong him. I do not for one moment admit that political morality is different from private morality, that a promise made on the stump differs from a promise made in private life. I do not for one moment admit that a man should act deceitfully as a public servant in his dealings with other nations, any more than that he should act deceitfully in his dealings as a private citizen with other private citizens. I do not for one moment admit that a nation should treat other nations in a different spirit from that in which an honorable man would treat other men.

In practically applying this principle to the two sets of cases there is, of course, a great practical difference to be taken into account. We speak of international law; but international law is something wholly different from private or municipal law, and the capital difference is that there is a sanction for the one and no sanction for the other; that there is an outside force which compels individuals to obey the one, while there is no such outside force to compel obedience as regards the other. International law will, I believe, as the generations pass, grow stronger and stronger until in some way or other there develops the power to make it respected. But as yet it is only in the first formative period. As yet, as a rule, each nation is of necessity obliged to judge for itself in matters of vital importance between it and its neighbors, and actions must of necessity, where this is the case, be different from what they are where, as among private citizens, there is an outside force whose action is all-powerful and must be invoked in any crisis of importance. It is the duty of wise statesmen, gifted with the power of looking ahead, to try to encourage and build up every movement which will substitute or tend to substitute some other agency for force in the settlement of international disputes. It is the duty of every honest statesman to try to guide the nation so that it shall not wrong any other nation. But as yet the great civilized peoples, if they are to be true to themselves and to the cause of humanity and civilization, must keep ever in mind that in the last resort they must possess both the will and the power to resent wrong-doing from others. The men who sanely believe in a lofty morality preach righteousness; but they do not preach weakness, whether among private citizens or among nations. We believe that our ideals should be high, but not so high as to make it impossible measurably to realize them. We sincerely and earnestly believe in peace; but if peace and justice conflict, we scorn the man who would not stand for justice though the whole world came in arms against him.

And now, my hosts, a word in parting. You and I belong to the only two republics among the great powers of the world. The ancient friendship between France and the United States has been, on the whole, a sincere and disinterested friendship. A calamity to you would be a sorrow to us. But it would be more than that. In the seething turmoil of the history of humanity certain nations stand out as possessing a peculiar power or charm, some special gift of beauty or wisdom or strength, which puts them among the immortals, which makes them rank forever with the leaders of mankind. France is one of these nations. For her to sink would be a loss to all the world. There are certain lessons of brilliance and of generous gallantry that she can teach better than any of her sister nations. When the French peasantry sang of Malbrook, it was to tell how the soul of this warrior-foe took flight upward through the laurels he had won. Nearly seven centuries ago, Froissart, writing of a time of dire disaster, said that the realm of France was never so stricken that there were not left men who would valiantly fight for it. You have had a great past. I believe that you will have a great future. Long may you carry yourselves proudly as citizens of a nation which bears a leading part in the teaching and uplifting of mankind.

THE THRALDOM OF NAMES

THE THRALDOM OF NAMES

It behooves our people never to fall under the thraldom of names, and least of all to be misled by designing people who appeal to the reverence for, or antipathy toward, a given name in order to achieve some alien purpose. Of course such misuse of names is as old as the history of what we understand when we speak of civilized mankind. The rule of a mob may be every whit as tyrannical and oppressive as the rule of a single individual, whether or not called a dictator; and the rule of an oligarchy, whether this oligarchy is a plutocracy or a bureaucracy, or any other small set of powerful men, may in its turn be just as sordid and just as bloodthirsty as that of a mob. But the apologists for the mob or oligarchy or dictator, in justifying the tyranny, use different words. The mob leaders usually state that all that they are doing is necessary in order to advance the cause of “liberty,” while the dictator and the oligarchy are usually defended upon the ground that the course they follow is absolutely necessary so as to secure “order.” Many excellent people are taken in by the use of the word “liberty” at the one time, and the use of the word “order” at the other, and ignore the simple fact that despotism is despotism, tyranny tyranny, oppression oppression, whether committed by one individual or by many individuals, by a state or by a private corporation.

Moreover, tyranny exercised on behalf of one set of people is very apt in the long run to damage especially the representatives of that very class by the violence of the reaction which it invites. The course of the second republic in France was such, with its mobs, its bloody civil tumults, its national workshops, its bitter factional divisions, as to invite and indeed insure its overthrow and the establishment of a dictatorship; while it is needless to mention the innumerable instances in which the name of order has been invoked to sanction tyranny, until there has finally come a reaction so violent that both the tyranny and all public order have disappeared together. The second empire in France led straight up to the Paris Commune; and nothing so well shows how far the French people had advanced in fitness for self-government as the fact that the hideous atrocities of the Commune, which rendered it imperative that it should be rigorously repressed, nevertheless did not produce another violent reaction, but left the French republic standing, and the French people as resolute in their refusal to be ruled by a king as by a mob.

Of course when a great crisis actually comes, no matter how much people may have been misled by names, they promptly awaken to their unimportance. To the individual who suffered under the guillotine at Paris, or in the drownings in the Loire, or to the individual who a century before was expelled from his beloved country, or tortured, or sent to the galleys, it made no difference whatever that one set of acts was performed under Robespierre and Danton and Marat in the name of liberty and reason and the rights of the people, or that the other was performed in the name of order and authority and religion by the direction of the great monarch. Tyranny and cruelty were tyranny and cruelty just as much in one case as in the other, and just as much when those guilty of them used one shibboleth as when they used another. All forms of tyranny and cruelty must alike be condemned by honest men.

We in this country have been very fortunate. Thanks to the teaching and the practice of the men whom we most revere as leaders, of the men like Washington and Lincoln, we have hitherto escaped the twin gulfs of despotism and mob rule, and we have never been in any danger from the worst forms of religious bitterness. But we should therefore be all the more careful, as we deal with our industrial and social problems, not to fall into mistakes similar to those which have brought lasting disaster on less fortunately situated peoples. We have achieved democracy in politics just because we have been able to steer a middle course between the rule of the mob and the rule of the dictator. We shall achieve industrial democracy because we shall steer a similar middle course between the extreme individualist and the Socialist, between the demagogue who attacks all wealth and who can see no wrong done anywhere unless it is perpetrated by a man of wealth, and the apologist for the plutocracy who rails against so much as a restatement of the eighth commandment upon the ground that it will “hurt business.”

First and foremost, we must stand firmly on a basis of good sound ethics. We intend to do what is right for the ample and sufficient reason that it is right. If business is hurt by the stem exposure of crookedness and the result of efforts to punish the crooked man, then business must be hurt, even though good men are involved in the hurting, until it so adjusts itself that it is possible to prosecute wrong-doing without stampeding the business community into a terror-struck defence of the wrong-doers and an angry assault upon those who have exposed them. On the other hand, we must beware, above all things, of being misled by wicked or foolish men who would condone homicide and violence, and apologize for the dynamiter and the assassin because, forsooth, they choose to take the ground that crime is no crime if the wicked man happens also to have been a shiftless and unthrifty or lazy man who has never amassed property. It is essential that we should wrest the control of the government out of the hands of rich men who use it for unhealthy purposes, and should keep it out of their hands; and to this end the first requisite is to provide means adequately to deal with corporations, which are essential to modern business, but which, under the decisions of the courts, and because of the short-sightedness of the public, have become the chief factors in political and business debasement. But it would be just as bad to put the control of the government into the hands of demagogues and visionaries who seek to pander to ignorance and prejudice by penalizing thrift and business enterprise, and ruining all men of means, with, as an attendant result, the ruin of the entire community. The tyranny of politicians with a bureaucracy behind them and a mass of ignorant people supporting them would be just as insufferable as the tyranny of big corporations. The tyranny would be the same in each case, and it would make no more difference that one was called individualism and the other collectivism than it made in French history whether tyranny was exercised in the name of the Commune or of the Emperor, of a committee of national safety, or of a king.

The sinister and adroit reactionary, the sinister and violent radical, are alike in this, that each works in the end for the destruction of the cause that he professedly champions. If the one is left to his own devices he will make such an exhibition of brutal and selfish greed as to utterly discredit the entire system of government by individual initiative; and if the other is allowed to work his will he, in his turn, will make men so loathe interference and control by the state that any abuses connected with the untrammelled control of all business by private individuals will seem small by comparison. We can not afford to be empirical. We must judge each case on its merits. It is absolutely indispensable to foster the spirit of individual initiative, of self-reliance, of self-help; but this does not mean that we are to refuse to face facts and to recognize that the growth of our complex civilization necessitates an increase in the exercise of the functions of the state. It has been shown beyond power of refutation that unrestricted individualism, for instance, means the destruction of our forests and our water supply. The dogma of “individualism” can not be permitted to interfere with the duty of a great city to see that householders, small as well as big, live in decent and healthy buildings, drink good water, and have the streets adequately lighted and kept clean. Individual initiative, the reign of individualism, may be crushed out just as effectively by the unchecked growth of private monopoly, if the state does not interfere at all, as it would be crushed out under communism, or as it would disappear, together with everything else that makes life worth living, if we adopted the tenets of the extreme Socialists.

In 1896 the party of discontent met with a smashing defeat for the very reason that, together with legitimate attacks on real abuses, they combined wholly illegitimate advocacy even of the methods of dealing with these real abuses, and in addition stood for abuses of their own which, in far-reaching damage, would have cast quite into the shade the effects of the abuses against which they warred. It was essential both to the material and moral progress of the country that these forces should be beaten; and beaten they were, overwhelmingly. But the genuine ethical revolt against these forces was aided by a very ugly materialism, and this materialism at one time claimed the victory as exclusively its own, and advanced it as a warrant and license for the refusal to interfere with any misdeeds on the part of men of wealth. What such an attitude meant was set forth as early as 1896 by an English visitor, the journalist Steevens, a man of marked insight. Mr. Steevens did not see with entire clearness of vision into the complex American character; it would have been marvellous if a stranger of his slight experience here could so have seen; but it would be difficult to put certain important facts more clearly than he put them. Immediately after the election he wrote as follows (I condense slightly):

“In the United States legal organization of industry has been left wholly wanting. Little is done by the state. All is left to the initiative of the individual. The apparent negligence is explained partly by the American horror of retarding mechanical progress, and partly by their reliance on competition. They have cast overboard the law as the safeguard of individual rights, and have put themselves under the protection of competition, and of it alone. Now a trust in its exacter acceptation is the flat negation of competition. It is certain that commercial concerns make frequent, powerful, and successful combinations to override the public interest. All such corporations are left unfettered in a way that to an Englishman appears almost a return to savagery. The defencelessness of individual liberty against the encroachment of the railway companies, tramway companies, nuisance-committing manure companies, and the like, is little less than horrible. Where regulating acts are proposed, the companies unite to oppose them; where such acts exist, they bribe corrupt officials to ignore them. When they want any act for themselves, it can always be bought for cash. [This is of course a gross exaggeration; and allusion should have been made to the violent and demagogic attacks upon corporations, which are even more common than and are quite as noxious as acts of oppression by corporations.] They maintain their own members in the legislative bodies—pocket assemblymen, pocket representatives, pocket senators. In the name of individual freedom and industrial progress they have become the tyrants of the whole community. Lawless greed on one side and lawless brutality on the other—the outlook frowns. On the wisdom of the rulers of the country in salving or imbittering these antagonisms—still more, on the fortune of the people in either modifying or hardening their present conviction that to get dollars is the one end of life—it depends whether the future of the United States is to be of eminent beneficence or unspeakable disaster. It may stretch out the light of liberty to the whole world. It may become the devil’s drill-ground where the cohorts of anarchy will furnish themselves against the social Armageddon.”

Mr. Steevens here clearly points out, what every one ought to recognize, that if individualism is left absolutely uncontrolled as a modern business condition the curious result will follow that all power of individual achievement and individual effort in the average man will be crushed out just as effectively as if the state took absolute control of everything. It would be easy to name several big corporations each one of which has within its sphere crushed out all competition so as to make, not only its rivals, but its customers as dependent upon it as if the government had assumed complete charge of the product. It would, in my judgment, be a very unhealthy thing for the government thus to assume complete charge; but it is even more unhealthy to permit a private monopoly thus to assume it. The simple truth is that the defenders of the theory of unregulated lawlessness in the business world are either insincere or blind to the facts when they speak of their system as permitting a healthy individualism and individual initiative. On the contrary, it crushes out individualism, save in a very few able and powerful men who tend to become dictators in the business world precisely as in the old days a Spanish-American president tended to become a dictator in the political world.

Moreover, where there is absolute lawlessness, absolute failure by the state to control or supervise these great corporations, the inevitable result is to favor, among these very able men of business, the man who is unscrupulous and cunning. The unscrupulous big man who gets complete control of a given forest tract, or of a network of railways which alone give access to a certain region, or who, in combination with his fellows, acquires control of a certain industry, may crush out in the great mass of citizens affected all individual initiative quite as much as it would be crushed out by state control. The very reason why we object to state ownership, that it puts a stop to individual initiative and to the healthy development of personal responsibility, is the reason why we object to an unsupervised, unchecked monopolistic control in private hands. We urge control and supervision by the nation as an antidote to the movement for state socialism. Those who advocate total lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism.

There must be law to control the big men, and therefore especially the big corporations, in the industrial world in the interest of our industrial democracy of to-day. This law must be efficient, and therefore it must be administered by executive officers and not by lawsuits in the courts. If this is not done the agitation to increase out of all measure the share of the government in this work will receive an enormous impetus. The movement for government control of the great business corporations is no more a movement against liberty than a movement to put a stop to violence is a movement against liberty. On the contrary, in each case alike it is a movement for liberty; in the one case a movement on behalf of the hard-working man of small means, just as in the other case it is a movement on behalf of the peaceable citizen who does not wish a “liberty” which puts him at the mercy of any rowdy who is stronger than he is. The huge, irresponsible corporation which demands liberty from the supervision of government agents stands on the same ground as the less dangerous criminal of the streets who wishes liberty from police interference.

But there is an even more important lesson for us Americans to learn, and this also is touched upon in what I have quoted above. It is not true, as Mr. Steevens says, that Americans feel that the one end of life is to get dollars; but the statement contains a very unpleasant element of truth. The hard materialism of greed is just as objectionable as the hard materialism of brutality, and the greed of the “haves” is just as objectionable as the greed of the “have-nots,” and no more so. The envious and sinister creature who declaims against a great corporation because he really desires himself to enjoy what in hard, selfish, brutal fashion the head of that great corporation enjoys, offers a spectacle which is both sad and repellent. The brutal arrogance and grasping greed of the one man are in reality the same thing as the bitter envy and hatred and grasping greed of the other. That kind of “have” and that kind of “have-not” stand on the same eminence of infamy. It is as important for the one as for the other to learn the lesson of the true relations of life. Of course, the first duty of any man is to pay his own way, to be able to earn his own livelihood, to support himself and his wife and his children and those dependent upon him. He must be able to give those for whom it is his duty to care food and clothing, shelter, medicine, an education, a legitimate chance for reasonable and healthy amusements, and the opportunity to acquire the knowledge and power which will fit them in their turn to do good work in the world. When once a man has reached this point, which, of course, will vary greatly under different conditions, then he has reached the point where other things become immensely more important than adding to his wealth. It is emphatically right, indeed, I am tempted to say, it is emphatically the first duty of each American, “to get dollars,” as Mr. Steevens contemptuously phrased it; for this is only another way of saying that it is his first duty to earn his own living. But it is not his only duty, by a great deal; and after the living has been earned getting dollars should come far behind many other duties.

Yet another thing. No movement ever has done or ever will do good in this country, where assault is made, not upon evil wherever found, but simply upon evil as it happens to be found in a particular class. The big newspaper, owned or controlled in Wall Street, which is everlastingly preaching about the iniquity of laboring men, which is quite willing to hound politicians for their misdeeds, but which with raving fury defends all the malefactors of great wealth, stands on an exact level with, and neither above nor below, that other newspaper whose whole attack is upon men of wealth, which declines to condemn, or else condemns in apologetic, perfunctory, and wholly inefficient manner, outrages committed by labor. This is the kind of paper which by torrents of foul abuse seeks to stir up a bitter class hatred against every man of means simply because he is a man of means, against every man of wealth, whether he is an honest man who by industry and ability has honorably won his wealth, and who honorably spends it, or a man whose wealth represents robbery and whose life represents either profligacy or at best an inane, useless, and tasteless extravagance. This country can not afford to let its conscience grow warped and twisted, as it must grow if it takes either one of these two positions. We must draw the line, not on wealth nor on poverty, but on conduct. We must stand for the good citizen because he is a good citizen, whether he be rich or whether he be poor, and we must mercilessly attack the man who does evil, wholly without regard to whether the evil is done in high or low places, whether it takes the form of homicidal violence among members of a federation of miners, or of unscrupulous craft and greed in the head of some great Wall Street corporation.

* * * * *

The best lesson that any people can learn is that there is no patent cure-all which will make the body politic perfect, and that any man who is able glibly to answer every question as to how to deal with the evils of the body politic is at best a foolish visionary and at worst an evil-minded quack. Neither doctrinaire socialism nor unrestricted individualism nor any other ism will bring about the millennium. Collectivism and individualism must be used as supplementary, not as antagonistic, philosophies. In the last analysis the welfare of a nation depends on its having throughout a healthy development. A healthy social system must of necessity represent the sum of very many moral, intellectual, and economic forces, and each such force must depend in its turn partly upon the whole system; and all these many forces are needed to develop a high grade of character in the individual men and women who make up the nation. No individual man could be kept healthy by living in accordance with a plan which took cognizance only of one set of muscles or set of organs; his health must depend upon his general bodily vigor, that is, upon the general care which affects hundreds of different organs according to their hundreds of needs. Society is, of course, infinitely more complex than the human body. The influences that tell upon it are countless; they are closely interwoven, interdependent, and each is acted upon by many others. It is pathetically absurd, when such are the conditions, to believe that some one simple panacea for all evils can be found. Slowly, with infinite difficulty, with bitter disappointments, with stumblings and haltings, we are working our way upward and onward. In this progress something can be done by continually striving to improve the social system, now here, now there. Something more can be done by the resolute effort for a many-sided higher life. This life must largely come to each individual from within, by his own effort, but toward the attainment of it each of us can help many others. Such a life must represent the struggle for a higher and broader humanity, to be shown not merely in the dealings of each of us within the realm of the state, but even more by the dealings of each of us in the more intimate realm of the family; for the life of the state rests and must ever rest upon the life of the family.

In one of Lowell’s biting satires he holds up to special scorn the smug, conscienceless creature who refuses to consider the morality of any question of social ethics by remarking that “they didn’t know everything down in Judee.” It is to be wished that some of those who preach and practise a gospel of mere materialism and greed, and who speak as if the heaping up of wealth by the community or by the individual were in itself the be-all and end-all of life, would learn from the most widely read and oldest of books that true wisdom which teaches that it is well to have neither great poverty nor great riches. Worst of all is it to have great poverty and great riches side by side in constant contrast. Nevertheless, even this contrast can be accepted if men are convinced that the riches are accumulated as the result of great service rendered to the people as a whole, and if their use is regulated in the interest of the whole community.

The movement for social and industrial reform has for two of its prime objects the prevention of the accumulation of wealth save by honest service to the country, and the supervision and regulation of its business use, and the determination of how it shall be taxed, and on what terms inherited, even when acquired and used honestly. This movement is a healthy movement. It aims to replace sullen discontent, restless pessimism, and evil preparation for revolution, by an aggressive, healthy determination to get to the bottom of our troubles and remedy them. To halt in the movement, as those blinded men wish who care only for the immediate relief from all obstacles which would thwart their getting what is not theirs, would work wide-reaching damage. Such a halt would turn away the energies of the energetic and forceful men who desire to reform matters from a legitimate object into the channel of bitter and destructive agitation.

PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP

PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP5

What counts in a man or in a nation is not what the man or the nation can do, but what he or it actually does. Scholarship that consists in mere learning, but finds no expression in production, may be of interest and value to the individual, just as ability to shoot well at clay pigeons may be of interest and value to him, but it ranks no higher unless it finds expression in achievement. From the standpoint of the nation, and from the broader standpoint of mankind, scholarship is of worth chiefly when it is productive, when the scholar not merely receives or acquires, but gives.

5 “The Mediæval Mind.” By Henry Osborn Taylor.

“The Life and Times of Cavour.” By William Roscoe Thayer.

Of course there is much production by scholarly men which is not, strictly speaking, scholarship; any more than the men themselves, despite their scholarly tastes and attributes, would claim to be scholars in the technical or purely erudite sense. The exceedingly valuable and extensive work of Edward Cope comes under the head of science, and represents original investigation and original thought concerning what that investigation showed; yet if the word scholarship is used broadly, his work must certainly be called productive scientific scholarship. General Alexander’s capital “Memoirs of a Confederate” show that a man who is a first-class citizen as well as a first-class fighting man may also combine the true scholar’s power of research and passion for truth with the ability to see clearly and to state clearly what he has seen. Mr. Hannis Taylor’s history of “The Origin and Growth of the American Constitution” and General Francis V. Greene’s history of the American Revolution could have been written only by scholars. Such altogether delightful volumes of essays as Mr. Crothers’s “Gentle Reader,” “Pardoner’s Wallet,” and “Among Friends” may not, in the strictest sense of the word, represent scholarship any more than the “Essays of Elia” represent scholarship; but they represent more than scholarship, and they could have been written only by a man of scholarly attributes. The same thing is true of Mr. Maurice Egan, now our Minister to Denmark—who so well upholds the tradition which has always identified American men of letters with American diplomacy—in his essays in Comparative Literature, named, as I think not altogether happily, from the first essay, “The Ghost in Hamlet.” Mr. Egan writes not merely with charm but as no one but a man of scholarly attributes could write—and, by the way, his dedication to Archbishop John Lancaster Spalding is a dedication to a man whose lofty spiritual teachings have been expressed in singularly beautiful English. In its most perfect expression scholarship must utter itself with literary charm and distinction; although, I am sorry to say, the professional scholars sometimes actually distrust scholarship which is able thus to bring forth wisdom divorced from pedantry and dryness. As an example, Gilbert Murray’s “Rise of the Greek Epic” not only shows profound scholarship and the profound scholarly instinct which can alone profit by the mere erudition of scholarship, but is also so delightfully written as to be as interesting as the most interesting novel; and, curiously enough, this very fact, coupled with the fact that Mr. Murray’s translations of Euripides and Aristophanes are so attractive, has tended to excite distrust of him in the minds of worthy scholars whose productions are themselves free from all taint of interest, from all taint of literary charm. Professor Lounsbury’s extraordinary scholarship has been fully appreciated only by the best scholars; and this partly because of the very fact of his many-sided development in the field of intellectual endeavor.

But I speak now of works of scholarship in the more conventional sense, of works which show scholarship such as Lea showed in his history of the Inquisition, such as Child showed in his studies of English ballad poetry.

Mr. Taylor’s study of “The Mediæval Mind” is a noteworthy contribution—I am tempted to say the most noteworthy of recent contributions—to the best kind of productive scholarship. His erudition is extraordinary in breadth and depth, his grasp of the subject no less marked than his power of conveying to others what he has thus grasped. He is not only faithful to the truth in large things, he is accurate in small matters also; and where he makes use of any statement he always shows that there is justification for it; although, by the way, I can only guess at his reason for calling Attila a “Turanian”—a word which carries a pleasant flavor of pre-Victorian ethnology, and might just about as appropriately be applied to Tecumseh. As he expressly states, Mr. Taylor is not concerned with the brutalities of mediæval life, nor with the lower grades of ignorance and superstition which abounded in the Middle Ages, but with the more informed and constructive spirit of the mediæval time. There is, of course, no hard and sharp line to be drawn between mediæval time and, on the one hand, what is “ancient” and, on the other hand, what is “modern”; but for his purposes he treats the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as showing the culmination of the mediæval spirit in its most characteristic form; although he also incidentally touches on things that occurred in the fourteenth century, and of course covers the slow upward movement through the Dark Ages (as to which he does rather less than justice to the Carolingian revival of learning), when men were groping in the black abyss into which civilization so rapidly slid after the close of the second century. His mastery of the facts is well-nigh perfect, and he handles them with singular sympathy. In such chapters as “The Spotted Actuality” he makes it evident that he has constantly before his own mind the whole picture. The ordinary reader, however, needs to remember that it is no part of Mr. Taylor’s purpose to present this whole picture, but merely to make a study somewhat analogous to what a study of the intellect of the nineteenth century would be if it dealt exclusively with the thought of the various universities of Europe and America and of circles like that of Emerson at Concord and Goethe at Weimar. Indeed, this comparison is hardly accurate, for the universities of the nineteenth century had a far closer connection with the living thought of the day than was true of the universities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The latter (like their feeble survivals in the Spanish-speaking countries) much more closely resembled the ordinary type of Mohammedan university of the present day, such a university as the big Mohammedan university at Cairo, than they resembled any modern university worth calling such, or, indeed, any ancient university of living and creative force.

The schoolmen of the Middle Ages and the universities in which they flourished are well worth such study as that which Mr. Taylor gives them, if only because they represented what regarded itself as the highest spiritual and intellectual teaching of the time, and because they symbolized the forces which manifested themselves with infinitely more permanent value in that wonderful cathedral architecture which was one of the two culminating architectural movements of all time—the other, of course, being the classical Greek. But the greatest mediæval effect upon the thought of after time was produced, not by the schoolmen, but by works which they would hardly have treated as serious at all—by the Roland Song, the “Nibelungenlied,” the Norse and Irish sagas, the Arthurian Cycle, including “Parsifal”; and modern literature, on its historical side, may be said to have begun with Villehardouin and Joinville. None of the leaders of the schools are to-day living forces in the sense that is true of the nameless writers who built up the stories of the immortal death fights in the Pyrenean pass and in the hall of Etzel, or of the search for the Holy Grail. There are keen intellects still influenced by Thomas Aquinas; but all the writings of all the most famous doctors of the schools taken together had no such influence on the religious thought of mankind as two books produced long afterward, with no conception of their far-reaching importance, by the obscure and humble authors of the “Imitation of Christ” and the “Pilgrim’s Progress.” In the thirteenth century the spiritual life in action, as apart from dogma, and as lived with the earnest desire to follow in the footsteps of the Christ, reached, in the person of Saint Francis of Assisi, as lofty a pinnacle of realized idealism as humanity has ever attained. But among those who, instead of trying simply to live up to their spiritual impulses, endeavored to deal authoritatively in the schools with spiritual and intellectual interests, the complementary tyranny and servility in all such spiritual and intellectual matters were such as we can now hardly imagine to ourselves. The one really great scientific investigator, Roger Bacon, who actually did put as an ideal before himself the honest search for truth, was imprisoned for years in consequence; and this in spite of the fact that his avowals of abject submission to theological authority and unquestioning adherence to dogma were such as we of to-day can with difficulty understand.

At first sight such an attitude in the intellectual world seems incompatible with the turbulent and lawless insistence on the right of each individual to do whatever he saw fit in the political and social world which characterized the seething life of the time. But, as Mr. Taylor points out, the minute that a man in the Middle Ages began to be free in any real sense he tended to become an outlaw; and, moreover, the men who were most intolerant of restraint in matters physical and material made no demands whatever for intellectual or spiritual freedom. The ordinary knight or nobleman, the typical “man of action” of the period, promptly resented any attempt to interfere with his brutal passions or coarse appetites; but, as he had neither special interest nor deep conviction in merely intellectual matters, he was entirely willing to submit to guidance concerning them. The attitude of the great baron of the highest class is amusingly shown by a conversation that Joinville records as having occurred between himself and King Louis the Saint. Among the questions which King Louis one day propounded to Joinville, in the interests of the higher morality, was whether Joinville would rather have leprosy or commit a mortal sin; to which Joinville responded with cordial frankness that he would rather commit thirty mortal sins than have leprosy. Now, in addition to being a most delightful chronicler, Joinville was an exceptionally well-behaved and religious baron, standing far above the average, and he was very careful to perform every obligation laid upon him by those whom he regarded as his spiritual advisers. The fact simply was that he had no idea of the need for spiritual or intellectual independence in the sense that a modern man has need for such independence, because he took only a superficial interest in anything concerned with intellectual inquiry. To harry a heretic or a Jew was not only a duty but a pleasure, and no effort whatever was needed to refrain from intellectual inquiry which presented to him not the slightest attraction; but leprosy was something tangible, something real, and the instant that the real came into collision with even the most insistent supposed spiritual obligation the rugged old baron went into immediate revolt.

The whole way of looking at life was so different from ours that only a thoroughly sympathetic and understanding writer like Mr. Taylor can set it forth in a manner that shall be sympathetic and yet not revolt us. One of his most delightful chapters is that on “The Heart of Heloise.” The qualities that Heloise displayed are those which eternally appeal to what is high and fine in human life; as for her lover, Abelard, it is possible to pardon the abject creature only by scornfully condemning the age which imposed upon him the rules of conduct in accordance with which he lived.

Mr. Thayer’s “Life of Cavour” is another first-rate example of productive scholarship. It is much more than a mere biography. The three greatest and most influential statesmen, in purpose and achievement, since the close of the Napoleonic epoch were Lincoln, Bismarck, and Cavour; and any account of either of them must necessarily be an account of the most vitally important things that happened to mankind during the period when each was playing his greatest part. An adequate biography of either must therefore be a permanent addition to history; such a biography could be written only by a scholar and writer of altogether exceptional attainments; and such a biography has been furnished by Mr. Thayer. Mr. Thayer is already well known as the author of various volumes dealing with Italy, all of them representing work worth doing, and all of them leading up to and making ready the way for the really notable history which he has now written. There are other books which should be read in connection with it; the younger Trevelyan’s brilliant studies of Garibaldi and the Italian revolutionists of 1848 and the dozen years immediately succeeding, and De La Gorce’s profoundly interesting histories of the Second Empire and the Second Republic in France, which contain the most powerful presentment of the period from the anti-revolutionary standpoint. Cavour not only did more than any other one man for Italian unity and independence, but he symbolized the movement as neither Garibaldi the Paladin, nor Mazzini the Republican, nor even King Victor Emmanuel symbolized it. As Mr. Thayer describes Cavour’s career it is not only of interest in itself, but it is of interest as showing that vast and complex aggregate of contradictory forces through whose warring chaos every great leader who fights for the well-being of mankind must force his way to triumph. Cavour had to contend against foes within just as much as against foes without. He had to hold the balance between the unreasoning reactionary and the unreasoning revolutionist, just exactly as on a larger or smaller scale all leaders in the forward movement of mankind must ever do. Mr. Thayer has set forth in masterly fashion the task to which the great statesman addressed himself and the manner in which that task was performed; his book is absorbingly interesting to the general reader, and should be of profit not merely to the special student but to every active politician who is in politics for any of the reasons which alone render it really worth while to be a politician at all. Mr. Thayer is devoted to his hero, as he ought to be; and he is a stanch partisan; but his obvious purpose is to be fair, and the principles of liberty to which he pins his faith are those upon which American governmental policy must always rest—although it is not necessary to follow him in all his views, as when he suddenly treats free trade from the fetichistic standpoint instead of as an economic expedient to be judged on its merits in any given case. Every man interested not only in the realities but in the possibilities of political advance should study this book; and, in addition to its intrinsic worth and interest, it is an example of the kind of productive scholarship which adds to the sum of American achievement.

* * * * *

Anything that Professor Lounsbury writes is certain to be interesting. Any collection by him of the writings of others is also certain to be interesting. Probably when Mr. Lounsbury is doing what he himself is willing to accept as work, it is both so profound and so erudite that we laymen can do little but admire it from a distance. Fortunately, however, he is also willing to do what he regards as play, such as a Life of Fenimore Cooper, or a study of English adapted to the needs of those who are not scholars; and all of his writing of this lighter kind adds markedly to the sum of enjoyment of laymen who are fond of reading.

The two volumes before me illustrate the good that can be done by people of cultivation who at our different universities provide the means needed to foster productive scholarship—for, unfortunately, productive scholarship in this country is apt to be unremunerative. The slender volume on the early literary career of Robert Browning6 is based on four lectures delivered at the University of Virginia under the terms of the Barbour-Page Foundation, a foundation due to the wisdom and generosity of Mrs. Thomas Nelson Page. The “Yale Book of American Verse”7 is published by the Yale University Press under the auspices of the Elizabethan Club of Yale University, a club founded by Mr. Alexander Smith Cochran. It is the kind of club the possession of which every real university in the country must envy Yale.

6 “The Early Literary Career of Robert Browning.” By Thomas R. Lounsbury.

7 “Yale Book of American Verse.” Collected by Thomas R. Lounsbury.

This study of Browning particularly appeals to any man who, although devoted to Browning, yet does not care for the pieces that some of the Browning clubs especially delight in. Browning’s great poems, those which will last as long as English literature lasts, are given their full meed of praise by Professor Lounsbury. The other poems, those which especially excite the interest of the average Browning society, are treated very amusingly and on the whole very justly. Professor Lounsbury insists that these “poems” will not permanently last, because they are essentially formless, and therefore not poetry at all, and indeed not literature. He holds that the attraction such poems exercise on certain people is the attraction of the unintelligible. Mr. Lounsbury’s writings are always full of delicious touches, and he is sometimes at his best in this little volume, as, for instance, where he says: “In fact, commentaries on Browning generally bear a close resemblance to fog-horns. They proclaim the existence of fog, but they do not disperse it.” One of his main contentions is that fundamentally the interest in those poems of Browning which are both very long and very obscure does not differ in kind from that displayed in guessing the answers to riddles or, to use a more dignified comparison, from that employed in the solution of difficult mathematical problems.

I think, however, that for the admiration of these rather obscure philosophical poems of Browning there is a reason upon which Mr. Lounsbury has not touched. He says truly that the men who admire Browning are very apt to be men not especially drawn to writers in whom lofty speculations have found their fitting counterpart in clearness and beauty of expression; and he instances Wordsworth and Tennyson as poets to be enjoyed only by men and women who have a certain degree of fondness for literature as literature. Now, I think it is true of Browning (as it is true of Walt Whitman) that many of the people who labor longest and hardest to master his meaning are entirely mistaken in thinking that they enjoy him as a poet. But I do not think that Mr. Lounsbury’s explanation that they prize him only as a puzzle fully accounts for the enjoyment of many of these men or the profit they derive from their study. The fact is that Browning does represent very deep thought, very real philosophy—mixed, of course, with much thought that is not deep at all but only obscure, and much would-be philosophy that has no meaning whatsoever. In an instance that came to my own knowledge, a class of college boys in a course of literature, after carefully studying Browning for a couple of months, and after then taking up Tennyson, unanimously abandoned Tennyson and insisted on returning to the study of Browning. These hard-working, intelligent boys were not all of them merely interested in puzzles. They were not all of them blind to poetry as such. They did care to a certain extent for form, but primarily they were interested in the great problems of life, they were interested in great and noble thoughts. Doubtless many of them rather enjoyed having to dig out the thought from involved language. But probably a greater number felt a larger enjoyment in finding lofty thought expressed in language which was even more lofty than obscure.

It is true that as a poet Browning is formless. But the poets who are great philosophers are few in number, and great philosophers who have any gift of expression whatever or any sense of form, or whose writings so much as approach the outer hem of literature, are even fewer in number. Browning the philosopher is not more deep than many other philosophers, and in form and expression he is inferior to many poets. But he is a philosopher, and he has form and expression. The philosophy he writes is literature, even though hardly in the highest sense poetic literature. Therefore he appeals to men who are primarily interested in his writings as philosophy, but who do derive a certain pleasure from form or expression; who, without being conscious of it, do like to have the writings they read resemble literature. These men are given by Browning something that no other poet and no other philosopher can give them; and I do not think that these men receive full justice at Mr. Lounsbury’s hands. Moreover, as compared to Tennyson or Longfellow, or any other of the more conventional poets—and I am extremely fond of these conventional poets—there is far more in Browning, even in Browning’s simpler and more understandable and formal poems, that gives expression to certain deep and complex emotions. There are many poets whom we habitually read far more often than Browning, and who minister better to our more primitive needs and emotions. There are very few whose lines come so naturally to us in certain great crises of the soul which are also crises of the intellect.

* * * * *

“The Yale Book of American Verse” is an excellent anthology, and the preface is one of the best things about it. In this preface Mr. Lounsbury quite unconsciously shows why he appeals to so many men to whom a college professor who is nothing more than a college professor does not readily appeal. He mentions that on the march to Gettysburg he picked up a torn piece of newspaper containing certain verses which have always remained in his mind, and which he includes in this collection of verse. This is the only hint in Professor Lounsbury’s writings that he fought in the Civil War. A professor of English literature in a great university who in his youth fought at Gettysburg must necessarily have something in him that speaks not only to scholars but to men.

This anthology includes hymns as well as secular poems. The collection is good in itself, as I have already said, and, moreover, to all real lovers of anthologies it will also seem good because each of them will take much satisfaction in wondering why certain of his or her favorite poems have been left out and why certain other poems have been put in. I suppose every man who cares for poetry at all at times wishes that he could compile an anthology for his own purposes. I certainly so feel. I would like to compile two anthologies, one of hymns and one of those poems which our ancestors designated quite ruthlessly as “profane,” in opposition to sacred. I should not expect any one else to read either of my collections. I should not wish the edition to consist of more than one copy. But I would like, purely for my own use, to own that copy! In the anthology of hymns, for instance, besides all the great hymns, from Bernard of Morlais to Cowper and Wesley and Bishop Heber, I would like to put in some hymns as to which I know nothing except that I like them. Every Christmas Eve in our own church at Oyster Bay, for instance, the children sing a hymn beginning “It’s Christmas Eve on the River, it’s Christmas Eve on the Bay.” Of course the hymn has come to us from somewhere else, but I do not know from where; and the average native of our village firmly believes that it is indigenous to our own soil—which it can not be, unless it deals in hyperbole, for the nearest approach to a river in our neighborhood is the village pond.

As for the “profane” anthology, I think I should like to make one consisting of several volumes. Even Mr. Lounsbury’s volume of American verse, though it contains some specimens of verse I would not have included, omits others which I certainly should put in. And then, think of the many, many volumes that would be needed to include the English poems, and the French poems, and the German poems from the Bard of the Dimbovitza, and all the other poems which no human being could make up his mind to see any anthology leave out! I fear that a perfect anthology of the kind that fills my dreams would be as large as the various rather dismal series of volumes which contain, as we are told, “the world’s best literature”—and doubtless would be as unsatisfactory.

Meanwhile, as all this represents an unattainable dream, we have reason to be glad that Mr. Lounsbury’s particular anthology has been published.

DANTE AND THE BOWERY

DANTE AND THE BOWERY

It is the conventional thing to praise Dante because he of set purpose “used the language of the market-place,” so as to be understanded of the common people; but we do not in practice either admire or understand a man who writes in the language of our own market-place. It must be the Florentine market-place of the thirteenth century—not Fulton Market of to-day. What infinite use Dante would have made of the Bowery! Of course, he could have done it only because not merely he himself, the great poet, but his audience also, would have accepted it as natural. The nineteenth century was more apt than the thirteenth to boast of itself as being the greatest of the centuries; but, save as regards purely material objects, ranging from locomotives to bank buildings, it did not wholly believe in its boasting. A nineteenth-century poet, when trying to illustrate some point he was making, obviously felt uncomfortable in mentioning nineteenth-century heroes if he also referred to those of classic times, lest he should be suspected of instituting comparisons between them. A thirteenth-century poet was not in the least troubled by any such misgivings, and quite simply illustrated his point by allusions to any character in history or romance, ancient or contemporary, that happened to occur to him.

Of all the poets of the nineteenth century, Walt Whitman was the only one who dared use the Bowery—that is, use anything that was striking and vividly typical of the humanity around him—as Dante used the ordinary humanity of his day; and even Whitman was not quite natural in doing so, for he always felt that he was defying the conventions and prejudices of his neighbors, and his self-consciousness made him a little defiant. Dante was not defiant of conventions: the conventions of his day did not forbid him to use human nature just as he saw it, no less than human nature as he read about it. The Bowery is one of the great highways of humanity, a highway of seething life, of varied interest, of fun, of work, of sordid and terrible tragedy; and it is haunted by demons as evil as any that stalk through the pages of the “Inferno.” But no man of Dante’s art and with Dante’s soul would write of it nowadays; and he would hardly be understood if he did. Whitman wrote of homely things and every-day men, and of their greatness, but his art was not equal to his power and his purpose; and, even as it was, he, the poet, by set intention, of the democracy, is not known to the people as widely as he should be known; and it is only the few—the men like Edward FitzGerald, John Burroughs, and W. E. Henley—who prize him as he ought to be prized.

Nowadays, at the outset of the twentieth century, cultivated people would ridicule the poet who illustrated fundamental truths, as Dante did six hundred years ago, by examples drawn alike from human nature as he saw it around him and from human nature as he read of it. I suppose that this must be partly because we are so self-conscious as always to read a comparison into any illustration, forgetting the fact that no comparison is implied between two men, in the sense of estimating their relative greatness or importance, when the career of each of them is chosen merely to illustrate some given quality that both possess. It is also probably due to the fact that an age in which the critical faculty is greatly developed often tends to develop a certain querulous inability to understand the fundamental truths which less critical ages accept as a matter of course. To such critics it seems improper, and indeed ludicrous, to illustrate human nature by examples chosen alike from the Brooklyn Navy Yard or Castle Garden and the Piræus, alike from Tammany and from the Roman mob organized by the foes or friends of Cæsar. To Dante such feeling itself would have been inexplicable.

Dante dealt with those tremendous qualities of the human soul which dwarf all differences in outward and visible form and station, and therefore he illustrated what he meant by any example that seemed to him apt. Only the great names of antiquity had been handed down, and so, when he spoke of pride or violence or flattery, and wished to illustrate his thesis by an appeal to the past, he could speak only of great and prominent characters; but in the present of his day most of the men he knew, or knew of, were naturally people of no permanent importance—just as is the case in the present of our own day. Yet the passions of these men were the same as those of the heroes of old, godlike or demoniac; and so he unhesitatingly used his contemporaries, or his immediate predecessors, to illustrate his points, without regard to their prominence or lack of prominence. He was not concerned with the differences in their fortunes and careers, with their heroic proportions or lack of such proportions; he was a mystic whose imagination soared so high and whose thoughts plumbed so deeply the far depths of our being that he was also quite simply a realist; for the eternal mysteries were ever before his mind, and, compared to them, the differences between the careers of the mighty masters of mankind and the careers of even very humble people seemed trivial. If we translate his comparisons into the terms of our day, we are apt to feel amused over this trait of his, until we go a little deeper and understand that we are ourselves to blame, because we have lost the faculty simply and naturally to recognize that the essential traits of humanity are shown alike by big men and by little men, in the lives that are now being lived and in those that are long ended.

Probably no two characters in Dante impress the ordinary reader more than Farinata and Capaneus: the man who raises himself waist-high from out his burning sepulchre, unshaken by torment, and the man who, with scornful disdain, refuses to brush from his body the falling flames; the great souls—magnanimous, Dante calls them—whom no torture, no disaster, no failure of the most absolute kind could force to yield or to bow before the dread powers that had mastered them. Dante has created these men, has made them permanent additions to the great figures of the world; they are imaginary only in the sense that Achilles and Ulysses are imaginary—that is, they are now as real as the figures of any men that ever lived. One of them was a mythical hero in a mythical feat, the other a second-rate faction leader in a faction-ridden Italian city of the thirteenth century, whose deeds have not the slightest importance aside from what Dante’s mention gives. Yet the two men are mentioned as naturally as Alexander and Cæsar are mentioned. Evidently they are dwelt upon at length because Dante felt it his duty to express a peculiar horror for that fierce pride which could defy its overlord, while at the same time, and perhaps unwillingly, he could not conceal a certain shuddering admiration for the lofty courage on which this evil pride was based.

The point I wish to make is the simplicity with which Dante illustrated one of the principles on which he lays most stress, by the example of a man who was of consequence only in the history of the parochial politics of Florence. Farinata will now live forever as a symbol of the soul; yet as an historical figure he is dwarfed beside any one of hundreds of the leaders in our own Revolution and Civil War. Tom Benton, of Missouri, and Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, were opposed to one another with a bitterness which surpassed that which rived asunder Guelph from Ghibellin, or black Guelph from white Guelph. They played mighty parts in a tragedy more tremendous than any which any mediæval city ever witnessed or could have witnessed. Each possessed an iron will and undaunted courage, physical and moral; each led a life of varied interest and danger, and exercised a power not possible in the career of the Florentine. One, the champion of the Union, fought for his principles as unyieldingly as the other fought for what he deemed right in trying to break up the Union. Each was a colossal figure. Each, when the forces against which he fought overcame him—for in his latter years Benton saw the cause of disunion triumph in Missouri, just as Jefferson Davis lived to see the cause of union triumph in the Nation—fronted an adverse fate with the frowning defiance, the high heart, and the stubborn will which Dante has commemorated for all time in his hero who “held hell in great scorn.” Yet a modern poet who endeavored to illustrate such a point by reference to Benton and Davis would be uncomfortably conscious that his audience would laugh at him. He would feel ill at ease, and therefore would convey the impression of being ill at ease, exactly as he would feel that he was posing, was forced and unnatural, if he referred to the deeds of the evil heroes of the Paris Commune as he would without hesitation refer to the many similar but smaller leaders of riots in the Roman forum.

Dante speaks of a couple of French troubadours, or of a local Sicilian poet, just as he speaks of Euripides; and quite properly, for they illustrate as well what he has to teach; but we of to-day could not possibly speak of a couple of recent French poets or German novelists in the same connection without having an uncomfortable feeling that we ought to defend ourselves from possible misapprehension; and therefore we could not speak of them naturally. When Dante wishes to assail those guilty of crimes of violence, he in one stanza speaks of the torments inflicted by divine justice on Attila (coupling him with Pyrrhus and Sextus Pompey—a sufficiently odd conjunction in itself, by the way), and in the next stanza mentions the names of a couple of local highwaymen who had made travel unsafe in particular neighborhoods. The two highwaymen in question were by no means as important as Jesse James and Billy the Kid; doubtless they were far less formidable fighting men, and their adventures were less striking and varied. Yet think of the way we should feel if a great poet should now arise who would incidentally illustrate the ferocity of the human heart by allusions both to the terrible Hunnish “scourge of God” and to the outlaws who in our own times defied justice in Missouri and New Mexico!

When Dante wishes to illustrate the fierce passions of the human heart, he may speak of Lycurgus, or of Saul; or he may speak of two local contemporary captains, victor or vanquished in obscure struggles between Guelph and Ghibellin; men like Jacopo del Cassero or Buonconte, whom he mentions as naturally as he does Cyrus or Rehoboam. He is entirely right! What one among our own writers, however, would be able simply and naturally to mention Ulrich Dahlgren, or Custer, or Morgan, or Raphael Semmes, or Marion, or Sumter, as illustrating the qualities shown by Hannibal, or Rameses, or William the Conqueror, or by Moses or Hercules? Yet the Guelph and Ghibellin captains of whom Dante speaks were in no way as important as these American soldiers of the second or third rank. Dante saw nothing incongruous in treating at length of the qualities of all of them; he was not thinking of comparing the genius of the unimportant local leader with the genius of the great sovereign conquerors of the past—he was thinking only of the qualities of courage and daring and of the awful horror of death; and when we deal with what is elemental in the human soul it matters but little whose soul we take. In the same way he mentions a couple of spendthrifts of Padua and Siena, who come to violent ends, just as in the preceding canto he had dwelt upon the tortures undergone by Dionysius and Simon de Montfort, guarded by Nessus and his fellow centaurs. For some reason he hated the spendthrifts in question as the Whigs of Revolutionary South Carolina and New York hated Tarleton, Kruger, Saint Leger, and De Lancey; and to him there was nothing incongruous in drawing a lesson from one couple of offenders more than from another. (It would, by the way, be outside my present purpose to speak of the rather puzzling manner in which Dante confounds his own hatreds with those of heaven, and, for instance, shows a vindictive enjoyment in putting his personal opponent Filippo Argenti in hell, for no clearly adequate reason.)

When he turns from those whom he is glad to see in hell toward those for whom he cares, he shows the same delightful power of penetrating through the externals into the essentials. Cato and Manfred illustrate his point no better than Belacqua, a contemporary Florentine maker of citherns. Alas! what poet to-day would dare to illustrate his argument by introducing Steinway in company with Cato and Manfred! Yet again, when examples of love are needed, he draws them from the wedding-feast at Cana, from the actions of Pylades and Orestes, and from the life of a kindly, honest comb-dealer of Siena who had just died. Could we now link together Peter Cooper and Pylades, without feeling a sense of incongruity? He couples Priscian with a politician of local note who had written an encyclopædia and a lawyer of distinction who had lectured at Bologna and Oxford; we could not now with such fine unconsciousness bring Evarts and one of the compilers of the Encyclopædia Britannica into a like comparison.

When Dante deals with the crimes which he most abhorred, simony and barratry, he flails offenders of his age who were of the same type as those who in our days flourish by political or commercial corruption; and he names his offenders, both those just dead and those still living, and puts them, popes and politicians alike, in hell. There have been trust magnates and politicians and editors and magazine-writers in our own country whose lives and deeds were no more edifying than those of the men who lie in the third and the fifth chasm of the eighth circle of the Inferno; yet for a poet to name those men would be condemned as an instance of shocking taste.

One age expresses itself naturally in a form that would be unnatural, and therefore undesirable, in another age. We do not express ourselves nowadays in epics at all; and we keep the emotions aroused in us by what is good or evil in the men of the present in a totally different compartment from that which holds our emotions concerning what was good or evil in the men of the past. An imitation of the letter of the times past, when the spirit has wholly altered, would be worse than useless; and the very qualities that help to make Dante’s poem immortal would, if copied nowadays, make the copyist ridiculous. Nevertheless, it would be a good thing if we could, in some measure, achieve the mighty Florentine’s high simplicity of soul, at least to the extent of recognizing in those around us the eternal qualities which we admire or condemn in the men who wrought good or evil at any stage in the world’s previous history. Dante’s masterpiece is one of the supreme works of art that the ages have witnessed; but he would have been the last to wish that it should be treated only as a work of art, or worshipped only for art’s sake, without reference to the dread lessons it teaches mankind.

THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY8

Mr. H. S. Chamberlain’s work on “The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century” is a noteworthy book in more ways than one. It is written by an Englishman who has been educated on the Continent, and has lived there until he is much more German than English. Previously he had written a book in French, while this particular book was written in German, and has only recently been translated into English. Adequately to review the book, or rather to write an adequate essay suggested by it, would need the space that would have been taken by an old-time Quarterly or Edinburgh Reviewer a century or fourscore years ago. I have called the book “noteworthy,” and this it certainly is. It ranks with Buckle’s “History of Civilization,” and still more with Gobineau’s “Inégalité des Races Humaines,” for its brilliancy and suggestiveness and also for its startling inaccuracies and lack of judgment. A witty English critic once remarked of Mitford that he had all the qualifications of an historian—violent partiality and extreme wrath. Mr. Chamberlain certainly possesses these qualifications in excess, and, combined with a queer vein of the erratic in his temperament, they almost completely offset the value of his extraordinary erudition, extending into widely varied fields, and of his occasionally really brilliant inspiration. He is, however, always entertaining; which is of itself no mean merit, in view of the fact that most serious writers seem unable to regard themselves as serious unless they are also dull.

8 “The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century.” By Houston Stewart Chamberlain. A translation from the German, by John Lees. With an introduction by Lord Redesdale. In two volumes.

Mr. Chamberlain’s thesis is that the nineteenth century, and therefore the twentieth and all future centuries, depend for everything in them worth mentioning and preserving upon the Teutonic branch of the Aryan race. He holds that there is no such thing as a general progress of mankind, that progress is only for those whom he calls the Teutons, and that when they mix with or are intruded upon by alien and, as he regards them, lower races, the result is fatal. Much that he says regarding the prevalent loose and sloppy talk about the general progress of humanity, the equality and identity of races, and the like, is not only perfectly true, but is emphatically worth considering by a generation accustomed, as its forefathers for the preceding generations were accustomed, to accept as true and useful thoroughly pernicious doctrines taught by well-meaning and feeble-minded sentimentalists; but Mr. Chamberlain himself is quite as fantastic an extremist as any of those whom he derides, and an extremist whose doctrines are based upon foolish hatred is even more unlovely than an extremist whose doctrines are based upon foolish benevolence. Mr. Chamberlain’s hatreds cover a wide gamut. They include Jews, Darwinists, the Roman Catholic Church, the people of southern Europe, Peruvians, Semites, and an odd variety of literary men and historians.9 To this sufficiently incongruous collection of antipathies he adds a much smaller selection of violent attachments, ranging from imaginary primitive Teutons and Aryans to Immanuel Kant, and Indian theology, metaphysics, and philosophy—he draws sharp distinctions between all three, and I merely use them to indicate his admiration for the Indian habit of thought, an admiration which goes hand in hand with and accentuates his violent hatred for what most sane people regard as the far nobler thought contained, for instance, in the Old Testament. He continually contradicts himself, or at least uses words in such diametrically opposite senses as to convey the effect of contradiction; and so it would be possible to choose phrases of his which contradict what is here said; but I think that I give a correct impression of his teaching as a whole.

9 Some of his antipathies appeal to the present writer; I much enjoy his irrelevant and hearty denunciation of the folly of treating the comparatively trivial Latin literature as of such peculiar importance as to entitle it to be grouped in grotesque association with the magnificent Greek literature under the unmeaning title of “classic.”

As he touches lightly on an infinitely varied range of subjects, it would be possible to choose almost at random passages to justify what is said above. Take, for instance, his dogmatic assertions concerning faith and works. He frantically condemns the doctrine of salvation by works and frantically exalts the doctrine of salvation by faith. Much that he says about both doctrines must be taken in so mystical and involved a sense that it contains little real meaning to ordinary men. Yet he is also capable of expressing, on this very subject, noble thought in a lofty manner. In one of his sudden lapses into brilliant sanity he emphasizes the fact that Saint Francis of Assisi was faith incorporate and yet the special apostle of good works; and that Martin Luther, the advocate of redemption by faith, consecrated his life and revealed to others the secret of good works—“free works done only to please God, not for the sake of piety.”

Unfortunately, these brilliant lapses into sanity are fixed in a matrix of fairly bedlamite passion and non-sanity. Mr. Chamberlain jeers with reason at the Roman Curia because until 1822 it kept on the Index all books which taught that the earth went round the sun; but really such action is not much worse than that of a man professing to write a book like this at the outset of the twentieth century who takes the attitude Mr. Chamberlain does toward the teaching of Darwin. The acceptance of the fundamental truths of evolution are quite as necessary to sound scientific thought as the acceptance of the fundamental truths concerning the solar system; and the attempt that Mr. Chamberlain in one place makes to draw a distinction between them is fantastic. Again, take what Mr. Chamberlain says of Aryans and Teutons. He bursts the flood-gates of scorn when he deals with persons who idealize humanity, or, as he styles it, “so-called humanity”; and he says: “For this humanity about which man has philosophized to such an extent suffers from the serious defect that it does not exist at all. History reveals to us a great number of various human beings, but no such thing as humanity”; yet on this very page he attributes the history of the growth of our civilization to its “Teutonic” character, and he uses the word “Teuton” as well as the word “Aryan” with as utter a looseness and vagueness as ever any philanthropist or revolutionist used the word “humanity.” All that he says in derision of such a forced use of the word “humanity” could with a much greater percentage of truthfulness be said as regards the words and ideas symbolized by Teutonism and Aryanism as Mr. Chamberlain uses these terms. Indeed, as he uses them they amount to little more than expressions of his personal likes and dislikes. His statement of the raceless chaos into which the Roman Empire finally lapsed is, on the whole, just, and, to use the words continually coming to one’s mind in dealing with him, both brilliant and suggestive. But in his anxiety to claim everything good for Aryans and Teutons he finally reduces himself to the position of insisting that wherever he sees a man whom he admires he must postulate for him Aryan, and, better still, Teutonic blood. He likes David, so he promptly makes him an Aryan Amorite. He likes Michael Angelo, and Dante, and Leonardo da Vinci, and he instantly says that they are Teutons; but he does not like Napoleon, and so he says that Napoleon is a true representative of the raceless chaos. The noted Italians in question, he states, were all of German origin, descended from the Germans who had conquered Italy in the sixth century. Now, of course, if Mr. Chamberlain is willing to be serious with himself, he must know perfectly well that even by the time of Dante seven or eight centuries had passed, and by the time of the other great Italians he mentions eight or ten centuries had passed, since the Germanic invasion. In other words, these great Italians were separated from the days of the Gothic and Lombard invasions by the distance which separates modern England from the Norman invasion; and his thesis has just about as much substance as would be contained in the statement that Wellington, Nelson, Turner, Wordsworth, and Tennyson excelled in their several spheres because they were all pure-blood descendants of the motley crew that came in with William the Conqueror. The different ethnic elements which entered into the Italy of the seventh century were in complete solution by the thirteenth, and it would have been quite as impossible to trace them to their several original strains as nowadays to trace in the average Englishman the various strains of blood from his Norman, Saxon, Celtic, and Scandinavian ancestors. Nor does Mr. Chamberlain mind believing two incompatible things in the quickest possible succession if they happen to suit his philosophy of the moment. Generally, when he speaks of the Teuton he thinks of the tall, long-headed man of the north; although, because of some crank in his mind, he puts in the proviso that he may have black as well as blond hair. The round-skulled man of middle Europe he usually condemns; but if his mind happens to run with approbation toward the Tyrolese, for instance, he at once forgets what ethnic division of Europeans it is to which they belong, and accepts them as typical Teutons. He greatly admires the teaching of the Apostle Paul, and so he endeavors to persuade himself that the Apostle Paul was not really a Jew; but he does not like the teachings of the Epistle of James on the subject of good works (teachings for which I have a peculiar sympathy, by the way), and accordingly he says that James was a pure Jew.

Fundamentally, very many of Mr. Chamberlain’s ideas are true and noble. I admire the morality with which he condemns the intolerance of Calvin and Luther no less strongly than the intolerance of their Roman opponents, and yet his acceptance of the fact that they could not have done their great work if there had not been in their characters an alloy which made it possible for actual humanity to accept their teaching. But even his sense of morality is as curiously capricious as that of Carlyle himself, and as little trustworthy. He glories in the pointless and wanton barbarity of the destruction of Carthage in the Third Punic War as saving Europe from the Afro-Asiatic peril—pure nonsense, of course, for Carthage was then no more dangerous to Rome than Corinth was, and the sacks of the two cities stand on a par as regards any importance in their after effects. Perhaps his attitude toward Byron is more practically mischievous, or at least shows a much less desirable trait of character. He says that the personality of Byron “has something repulsive in it for every thorough Teuton, because we nowhere encounter in it the idea of duty,” which makes him “unsympathetic, un-Teutonic”; but he adds that Teutons do not object in the least to his licentiousness, and, on the contrary, see in it “a proof of genuine race”! Really, this reconciliation of a high ideal of duty with gross licentiousness would be infamous if it were not so unspeakably comic. On the next page, by the way, Mr. Chamberlain says that Louis XIV was anti-Teutonic in his persecution of the Protestants, but a thorough Teuton when he defended the liberties of the Gallican church against Rome! Now such intellectual antics as these, and the haphazard use of any kind of a name (without the least reference to its ordinary use, provided Mr. Chamberlain has taken a fancy to it) to represent or symbolize any individual or attribute of which he approves, makes it very difficult to accept the book as having any serious merit whatever. Yet interspersed with innumerable pages which at best are those of an able man whose mind is not quite sound, and at worst lose their brilliancy without their irrationality, there are many pages of deep thought and lofty morality based upon wide learning and wide literary and even scientific knowledge. There could be no more unsafe book to follow implicitly, and few books of such pretensions more ludicrously unsound; and yet it is a book which students and scholars, and men who, though neither students nor scholars, are yet deeply interested in life, must have on their book-shelves. Much the same criticism should be passed upon him that he himself passes upon John Fiske, to whose great work, “The History of the Discovery of America,” he gives deserved and unstinted praise, but at whom he rails for solemnly, and, as Mr. Chamberlain says, with more than Papal pretensions to infallibility, setting forth complete patent solutions for all the problems connected not merely with the origin but with the destiny of man. Mr. Chamberlain differentiates sharply between the admirable work Fiske did in such a book as that treating of the discovery of America and the work he did when he ventured to dogmatize loosely, after the manner of Darwin’s successors in the ’70s and ’80s, upon a scanty collection of facts very imperfectly understood. But Mr. Chamberlain himself would have done far better if in his book he had copied the methods and modesty of Fiske at his best—the methods and modesty of such books as Sutherland’s “Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct”—and had refrained from taking an attitude of cock-sureness concerning problems which at present no one can more than imperfectly understand. He is unwise to follow Brougham’s example and make omniscience his foible.

Yet, after all is said, a man who can write such a really beautiful and solemn appreciation of true Christianity, of true acceptance of Christ’s teachings and personality, as Mr. Chamberlain has done, a man who can sketch as vividly as he has sketched the fundamental facts of the Roman empire in the first three centuries of our era, a man who can warn us as clearly as he has warned about some of the pressing dangers which threaten our social fabric because of indulgence in a morbid and false sentimentality, a man, in short, who has produced in this one book materials for half a dozen excellent books on utterly diverse subjects, represents an influence to be reckoned with and seriously to be taken into account.

THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN A REVERENT SPIRIT

THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN A REVERENT SPIRIT

There is superstition in science quite as much as there is superstition in theology, and it is all the more dangerous because those suffering from it are profoundly convinced that they are freeing themselves from all superstition. No grotesque repulsiveness of mediæval superstition, even as it survived into nineteenth-century Spain and Naples, could be much more intolerant, much more destructive of all that is fine in morality, in the spiritual sense, and indeed in civilization itself, than that hard dogmatic materialism of to-day which often not merely calls itself scientific but arrogates to itself the sole right to use the term. If these pretensions affected only scientific men themselves, it would be a matter of small moment, but unfortunately they tend gradually to affect the whole people, and to establish a very dangerous standard of private and public conduct in the public mind.

This tendency is dangerous everywhere, but nowhere more dangerous than among the nations in which the movement toward an unshackled materialism is helped by the reaction against the deadly thraldom of political and clerical absolutism. The first of the books mentioned below10 is written by a Montevideo gentleman of distinction. Under the rather fanciful title of “The Death of the Swan” it deals with the shortcomings of Latin civilization, accepts whole-heartedly the doctrines of pure materialism as a remedy for these shortcomings, and draws lessons from the success of the Northern races, and especially of our own countrymen, which I, for one, am unwilling to have drawn. The author feels that the civilization of France, Italy, and Spain is going down, and that it owes its decadence to submission to an outworn governmental and ecclesiastical tyranny, and especially to the futility of its ideals in government, religion, and the whole art of living, a futility so wrong-headed and far-reaching as to have turned aside the people from all that makes for real efficiency and success. In his revolt against sentimentality, mock humanitarianism, and hypocrisy the author advocates frank egotism and brutality as rules of conduct for both individuals and nations; and in his revolt against the theological tyranny and superstition from which the Spanish peoples in the Old and New Worlds have suffered so much in the past he advocates implicit obedience to the revolting creed which would treat gold and force as the true and only gods for human guidance; and this he does in the name of science and enlightenment and of exact and correct thinking. He speaks with admiration of certain American qualities, confounding in curious fashion the use and abuse of great but dangerous traits. He fails to see that the line of separation between the school of Washington and of Lincoln and the school of the prophets of brutal force, as expressed in the deification of either Mars or Mammon, is as sharp as that which distinguishes both of these schools from the apostles of the silly sentimentalism which he justly condemns. He sees that the really great Americans were thoroughly practical men; but he is blind to the fact that they were also lofty idealists. It was precisely because they were both idealists and practical men that they made their mark deep in history. He sees that they abhorred bigotry and superstition; he does not see that they were sundered as far from the men who attack all religion and all order as from the men who uphold either governmental or religious tyranny. It was the fact that Washington and Lincoln refused to carry good policies to bad extremes, and at the same time refused to be frightened out of supporting good policies because they might lead to bad extremes, that made them of such far-reaching usefulness.

10 “La Mort du Cygne.” By Carlos Reyles. Translation from Spanish into French by Alfred de Bengoechea.

“Thoughts of a Catholic Anatomist.” By Thomas Dwight, M.D.

“The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.” By Henry Osborn Taylor.

“Some Neglected Factors in Evolution.” By Henry M. Bernard.

“The World of Life.” By Alfred Russel Wallace.

“William James.” By Émile Boutroux.

“Science et Religion.” By Émile Boutroux.

“Science and Religion.” By Émile Boutroux. Translation into English by Jonathan Nield.

“Creative Evolution.” By Henri Bergson. Authorized translation by Arthur Mitchell.

“The Varieties of Religious Experience.” By William James.

“Time and Free Will.” By Henri Bergson. Translation by F. L. Pogson.

“From Epicurus to Christ.” By William De Witt Hyde.

“The Sixth Sense.” By Bishop Charles H. Brent.

I need hardly say that I am not attempting to review these books in even the briefest and most epitomized fashion. I use them only to illustrate certain phases, good and bad, in the search for truth; as, for instance, the harm that comes from seeking to apply, universally, truth as apprehended by the mere materialist, the futility of trying to check this harm by invoking the spirit of reactionary mediævalism, and the fundamental agreement reached by truth-seekers of the highest type, both scientific and religious.

Dr. Dwight’s book is very largely a protest against the materialistic philosophy which has produced such conceptions of life, and against these conceptions of life themselves. With this protest we must all heartily sympathize; unfortunately, it is impossible to have such sympathy with the reactionary spirit in which he makes his protest. There is much that is true in the assault he makes; but in his zeal to show where the leaders of the modern advance have been guilty of shortcomings he tends to assume positions which would put an instant stop to any honest effort to advance at all, and would plunge us back into the cringing and timid ignorance of the Dark Ages. Apparently the ideal after which Dr. Dwight strives is that embodied in the man of the Middle Ages of whom Professor Henry Osborn Taylor in one of his profound and able studies has said: “The mediæval man was not spiritually self-reliant, his character was not consciously wrought by its own strength of mind and purpose. Subject to bursts of unrestraint, he yet showed no intelligent desire for liberty.”

Dr. Dwight holds that there is an ominous parallelism between the lines of thought of the materialistic scientists of to-day and those of the French Revolution. Strongly though he disapproves of much of the thought of modern science, he disapproves even more strongly of the Revolution. In speaking of the similarities between them he says:

“Among the characters of the Revolution we meet all kinds of company. There are the honest men anxious for reform, the protesters against what they conceived to be religious oppression, the dreamy idealists without definite plan, the ranting orators of the ‘mountain,’ fanatics and demagogues at once, the wily ones who make a living from the more or less sincere promulgation of revolutionary doctrines and who find legalized plunder very profitable, the army of those who for fear or for favor prefer to be on the winning side and follow the fashionable doctrines without an examination which most of them are incompetent to make, and finally the mob of the sans-culottes rejoicing in the overthrow of law, order, and decency.”

This is true, although it does not contain by any means the whole truth; moreover, the parallelism with the scientific movement of the present day undoubtedly in part obtains. Yet the saying which Dr. Dwight quotes with approval from Herbert Spencer applies to what he himself attempts; to destroy the case of one’s opponents and to justify one’s own case are two very different things. At present we are in greater danger of suffering in things spiritual from a wrong-headed scientific materialism than from religious bigotry and intolerance; just as at present we are threatened rather by what is vicious among the ideas that triumphed in the Revolution than we are from what is vicious in the ideas that it overthrew. But this is merely because victorious evil necessarily contains more menace than defeated evil; and it will not do to forget the other side, nor to let our protest against the evil of the present drive us into championship of the evil of the past. The excesses of the French Revolution were not only hideous in themselves, but were fraught with a menace to civilization which has lasted until our time and which has found its most vicious expression in the Paris Commune of 1871 and its would-be imitators here and in other lands. Nevertheless, there was hope for mankind in the French Revolution, and there was none in the system against which it was a protest, a system which had reached its highest development in Spain. Better the terrible flame of the French Revolution than the worse than Stygian hopelessness of the tyranny—physical, intellectual, spiritual—which brooded over the Spain of that day. So it is with the modern scientific movement. There is very much in it to regret; there is much that is misdirected and wrong; and Dr. Dwight is quite right in the protest he makes against Haeckel and to a less extent against Weismann, and against the intolerant arrogance and fanatical dogmatism which the scientists of their school display to as great an extent as ever did any of the ecclesiastics against whom they profess to be in revolt. The experience of our sister republic of France has shown us that not only scientists but politicians, professing to be radical in their liberalism, may in actual fact show a bigoted intolerance of the most extreme kind in their attacks on religion; and bigotry and intolerance are at least as objectionable when anti-religious as when nominally religious. But in his entirely proper protest against these men and their like Dr. Dwight is less than just to Darwin and to many another seeker after truth, and he fails to recognize the obligation under which he and those like him have been put by the fearless pioneers of the new movement. The debt of mankind to the modern scientific movement is incalculable; the evil that has accompanied it has been real; but the good has much outweighed the evil. It is only the triumph of the movement led by the men against whom Dr. Dwight protests that has rendered it possible for books such as Dr. Dwight’s to be published with the approval—as in his case—of the orthodox thought of the church to which the writer belongs.

The most significant feature of his book is the advance it marks in the distance which orthodoxy has travelled. He grudgingly admits the doctrine of evolution, although—quite rightly, and in true scientific spirit, by the way—he insists most strongly upon the fact that we are as yet groping in the dark as we essay to explain its causes or show its significance; and he is again quite right in holding up as an example to the dogmatists of modern science what Roger Bacon said in the thirteenth century: “The first essential for advancement in knowledge is for men to be willing to say, ‘We do not know.’” He, of course, treats of the solar system, the law of gravitation, and the like as every other educated man now treats of them. Now, all of this represents a great advance. A half-century ago no recognized authorities of any church would have treated an evolutionist as an orthodox man. A century ago Dr. Dwight would not have been permitted to print his book as orthodox if it had even contained the statement that the earth goes round the sun. In the days of Leonardo da Vinci popular opinion sustained the church authorities in their refusal to allow that extraordinary man to dissect dead bodies, and the use of antitoxin would unquestionably have been considered a very dangerous heresy from all standpoints. In their generations Copernicus and Galileo were held to be dangerous opponents of orthodoxy, just as Darwin was held to be when he brought out his “Origin of Species,” just as Mendel’s work would have been held if Darwin’s far greater work had not distracted attention from him. The discovery of the circulation of the blood was at the time thought by many worthy people to be in contradiction of what was taught in Holy Writ; and the men who first felt their way toward the discovery of the law of gravitation made as many blunders and opened themselves to assault on as many points as was the case with those who first felt their way to the establishment of the doctrine of evolution. The Dr. Dwights of to-day can write with the freedom they do only because of the triumph of the ideas of those scientific innovators of the past whom the Dr. Dwights of their day emphatically condemned.

But when Dr. Dwight attacks the loose generalizations, absurd dogmatism, and ludicrous assumption of omniscient wisdom of not a few of the so-called leaders of modern science, he is not only right but renders a real service. The claims of certain so-called scientific men as to “science overthrowing religion” are as baseless as the fears of certain sincerely religious men on the same subject. The establishment of the doctrine of evolution in our time offers no more justification for upsetting religious beliefs than the discovery of the facts concerning the solar system a few centuries ago. Any faith sufficiently robust to stand the—surely very slight—strain of admitting that the world is not flat and does move round the sun need have no apprehensions on the score of evolution, and the materialistic scientists who gleefully hail the discovery of the principle of evolution as establishing their dreary creed might with just as much propriety rest it upon the discovery of the principle of gravitation. Science and religion, and the relations between them, are affected by one only as they are affected by the other. Genuine harm has been done by the crass materialism of men like Haeckel, a materialism which, in its unscientific assumptions and in its utter insufficiency to explain all the phenomena it professes to explain, has been exposed in masterly fashion by such really great thinkers—such masters not only of philosophy but of material science—as William James, Émile Boutroux, and Henri Bergson. It is worth while to quote the remarks of Alfred Russel Wallace, the veteran evolutionist: “With Professor Haeckel’s dislike of the dogmas of theologians and their claims as to the absolute knowledge of the nature and attributes of the inscrutable mind that is the power within and behind and around nature many of us have the greatest sympathy; but we have none with his unfounded dogmatism of combined negation and omniscience, and more especially when this assumption of superior knowledge seems to be put forward to conceal his real ignorance of the nature of life itself.” Dr. Dwight is emphatically right when he denies that science (using the word, as he does, as meaning merely the science of material things) has taught “a new and sufficient gospel,” or that, to use his own words, there is any truth “in the boast of infidel science that she and she alone has all that is worth having.” He could go even further than he does in refuting the queer optimism of those evolutionists who insist that evolution in the human race necessarily means progress; for every true evolutionist must admit the possibility of retrogression no less than of progress, and exactly as species of animals have sunk after having risen, so in the history of mankind it has again and again happened that races of men, and whole civilizations, have sunk after having risen. In so far as Dr. Dwight’s view of religion is that it is the gospel of duty and of human service, his view is emphatically right; and surely when the doctrine of the gospel of works is taken to mean the gospel of service to mankind, and not merely the performance of a barren ceremonial, it must command the respect, and I hope the adherence, of all devout men of every creed, and even of those who adhere to no creed of recognized orthodoxy.

In the same way I heartily sympathize with his condemnation of the men who stridently proclaim that “science has disposed of religion,” and with his condemnation of the scientific men who would try to teach the community that there is no real meaning to the words “right” and “wrong,” and who therefore deny free-will and accountability. Even as sound a thinker as Mr. Bernard, whose book is rightly, as he calls it, “an essay in constructive biology,” who in his theory of group development has opened a new biological and even sociological field of capital importance, who explicitly recognizes the psychical accompaniment of physical force as something distinct from it, and whose final chapter on the integration of the human aggregate shows that he has a far nobler view of life than any mere materialist can have, yet falls into the great mistake of denying freedom of the will, merely because he with his finite material intelligence can not understand it. Dr. Dwight is right in his attitude toward the scientific men who thus assume that there is no freedom of the will because on a material basis it is not explicable. Whenever any so-called scientific men develop, as an abstract proposition, a theory in accordance with which it would be quite impossible to conduct the affairs of mankind for so much as twenty-four hours, the wise attitude of really scientific men would be to reject that theory, instead of following the example of the, I fear not wholly imaginary, scientist who, when told that the facts did not fit in with his theory, answered: “So much the worse for the facts.” M. Bergson, in his “Creative Evolution,” has brought out with convincing clearness the great truth that the human brain, so able to deal with purely material things, and with sciences, such as geometry, in which thought is concerned only with unorganized matter, works under necessarily narrow limitations—limitations in reality very, very narrow, and never to be made really broad by mere intellect—when it comes to grasping any part of the great principle of life. Reason can deal effectively only with certain categories. True wisdom must necessarily refuse to allow reason to assume a sway outside of its limitations; and where experience plainly proves that the intellect has reasoned wrongly, then it is the part of wisdom to accept the teachings of experience, and bid reason be humble—just as under like conditions it would bid theology be humble. A certain school of Greek philosophers was able to prove logically that there was not, and could not be, any such thing as motion, and that, even if there were, it was quite impossible logically for a pursuing creature ever to overtake a fleeing creature which was going at inferior speed; but all that was really accomplished by this teaching was to prove the need of much greater intellectual humility on the part of those who believed that they were capable of thinking out an explanation for everything. Mr. Bernard ought not to have been caught in such a dilemma, because of the very fact that he does not cast in his lot with the crass materialists; for he admits that there are many things we do not know, that there is much which our intelligence—necessarily functioning in material fashion—can not understand. It is just as idle for a man to try to explain everything in the moral and spiritual world by that which he is able to apprehend of the material world as it would be for a polyp to try to explain the higher emotions of mankind in terms of polyp materialism. Not only would it be quite impossible to conduct even the lowest form of civil society without practical acknowledgment of free-will and accountability—an acknowledgment always made in practice by every single individual of those who deny it in theory—but even in their writings the very men who deny free-will and accountability inevitably and continually use language which has no meaning except on the supposition that both of them exist. Mr. Bernard, for instance, on the same page on which he denies freedom of the will, makes an impatient plea for just laws, and explains that by “just laws” he means laws that are in accordance with the highest conceptions of human relationships; he complains that the legal idea of justice is invariably far behind that of our psychic perceptions; and elsewhere, as on page 457, he speaks of the “duties” of man and of his “moral perceptions,” and on page 473 he asks for perfection of the community, so that “social life worked out by the highest wisdom of mankind will at once rise to a newer and higher physical and psychic level.” All of this is meaningless if there are no such things as freedom of the will and accountability; and its goes to show that even a profound and original thinker, if he has dwelt too long in the realms where the pure materialist is king, needs to pay heed to M. Bergson’s pregnant saying that “pure reasoning needs to be supervised by common sense, which is an altogether different thing.” A part, and an essential part, of the same truth is expressed by Mr. Taylor when he paraphrases Saint Augustine in insisting that “the truths of love are as valid as the truths of reason.”

Dr. Dwight and the many men whose habits of thought are similar to his perform a real service when they keep people from being led astray by the mischievous dogmas of those who would give to each passing and evanescent phase of materialistic scientific thought a dogmatic value; and our full acknowledgment of this service does not in the least hinder us from also realizing and acknowledging that the advance in scientific discovery, which has been and will be of such priceless worth to mankind, can not be made by men of this type, but only by the bolder, more self-reliant spirits, by men whose unfettered freedom of soul and intellect yields complete fealty only to the great cause of truth, and will not be hindered by any outside control in the search to attain it. A brake is often a useful and sometimes an indispensable piece of equipment of a wagon; but it is never as important as the wheels. As the University of Wisconsin declared when Dr. Richard T. Ely was tried for economic heresy: “In all lines of investigation the investigator must be absolutely free to follow the paths of truth wherever they may lead.”

It is always a difficult thing to state a position which has two sides with such clearness as to bring it home to the hearers. In the world of politics it is easy to appeal to the unreasoning reactionary, and no less easy to appeal to the unreasoning advocate of change, but difficult to get people to show for the cause of sanity and progress combined the zeal so easily aroused against sanity by one set of extremists and against progress by another set of extremists. So in the world of the intellect it is easy to take the position of the hard materialists who rail against religion, and easy also to take the position of those whose zeal for orthodoxy makes them distrust all action by men of independent mind in the search for scientific truth; but it is not so easy to make it understood that we both acknowledge our inestimable debt to the great masters of science, and yet are keenly alive to their errors and decline to surrender our judgment to theirs when they go wrong. It is imperative to realize how very grave their errors are, and how foolish we should be to abandon our adherence to the old ideals of duty toward God and man without better security than the more radical among the new prophets can offer us. The very blindest of those new scientific prophets are those whose complacency is greatest in their belief that the material key is that which unlocks all the mysteries of the universe, and that the finite mind of man can, not merely understand, but pass supercilious judgment upon, these mysteries. Mr. Wallace stands in honorable contrast to the men of this stamp. No one has criticised with greater incisiveness what he properly calls “the vague, incomprehensible, and offensive assertions of the biologists of the school of Haeckel.” He shows his scientific superiority to these men by his entire realization of the limitations of the human intelligence, by his realization of the folly of thinking that we have explained what we are simply unable to understand when we use such terms as “infinity of time” and “infinity of space” to cover our ignorance; and he stands not far away from the school of MM. Boutroux and Bergson, and, old man though he is, comes near the attitude of the more serious among the younger present-day scientific investigators—of the stamp of Professor Osborn, of the American Museum of Natural History—in his readiness to acknowledge that the materialistic and mechanical explanations of the causes of evolution have broken down, and that science itself furnishes an overwhelming argument for “creative power, directive mind, and ultimate purpose” in the process of evolution.

The law of evolution is as unconditionally accepted by every serious man of science to-day as is the law of gravitation; and it is no more and no less foolish to regard one than the other as antagonistic to religion. To reject either on Biblical grounds stands on a par with insisting, on the same grounds, that geological science must reconcile itself—and astronomy as well—to a universe only six thousand years old. The type of theologian who takes such a position occupies much the same intellectual level with the strutting materialists of the Haeckel type. To all men of this kind I most cordially commend a capital book, “Evolution and Dogma,” by the Rev. J. A. Zahm, one-time professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana.

The great distinguishing feature of the centuries immediately past has been the extraordinary growth in man’s knowledge of, and power to understand and command, his own physical nature and his physical surroundings in the universe. It is this growth which so sharply distinguishes modern civilization, the civilization which we may roughly date as beginning about the time of Columbus’s voyage, from all preceding civilizations; and it has not only immeasurably increased man’s power over nature, but, when rightly understood, has also measurably added to his inner dignity and worth, and to his power and command over things spiritual no less than material. This conquest could have been achieved only by men who dared to follow wherever their longing for the truth led them, and who were masters of their own consciences, and as little servile to the past as to the present. But no such movement for the uplifting of mankind ever has taken place, or ever will or can take place, without being fraught also with great dangers to mankind. Our hope lies in progress, for if we try to remain stationary we shall surely go backward; and yet as soon as we leave the ground on which we stand in order to advance there is always danger that we shall plunge into some abyss.

Naturally, the men who have taken the lead in these extraordinary material discoveries have often tended to think that there is nothing to discover or to believe in except what is material. Much of the growth in our understanding of nature has been due to men whose high abilities were nevertheless rigidly limited in certain directions. Our knowledge of solar systems so inconceivably remote that the remoteness is itself unreal to our senses; our knowledge of animate and inanimate forces working on a scale so infinitesimal and yet so powerful as to be almost impossible for our imaginations to grasp; our knowledge of the eons through which life has existed on this planet; the extraordinary advances in knowledge denoted by the establishment of such doctrines as those of gravitation and of evolution; in short, the whole enormous incredible advance in knowledge of the physical universe and of man’s physical place in that universe, has been due to the labor of students whose special tastes and abilities lay in the direction of dealing with what is purely material. Their astounding success, and the far-reaching, indeed the stupendous, importance of their achievements, have naturally tended to make those among them who possess genuine but narrow ability, whose minds are keen but not broad, assume an attitude of hard, arrogant, boastful, self-sufficient materialism: a mental attitude which glorifies and exalts its own grievous shortcomings and its inability to perceive anything outside the realm of the body. This attitude is as profoundly repellent as that of the civil and ecclesiastical reactionaries, the foes of all progress, against whom these men profess to be in revolt; and, moreover, it is an attitude which is itself as profoundly unscientific as any of the anti-scientific attitudes which it condemns. The universal truth can never be even imperfectly understood or apprehended unless we have the widest possible knowledge of our physical surroundings, and unless we fearlessly endeavor to find out just what the facts and the teachings of these physical surroundings are; but neither will it ever be understood if the physical and material explanations of life are accepted as all-sufficient. By none is this more clearly recognized than by the most acute and far-sighted of the investigators into physical conditions. Says Mr. Bernard: “There are psychic elements wholly different in kind from the physical elements ... [they] constitute, in a way impossible to define, a new character, quality, element—or shall we at once boldly borrow a term from mathematics and call it a new ‘dimension’ of our environment, hitherto three-dimensional? These various mental conditions lead us to believe that at any moment, while being driven through this three-dimensional environment, we may also be plunged into a psychic condition which hangs like an atmosphere over our particular physical surroundings.”

Not only every truly religious, but every truly scientific, man must turn with relief from the narrowness of a shut-in materialism to the profound and lofty thought contained in the writings of William James, of his biographer, M. Émile Boutroux, and of another philosopher of the same school, M. Bergson. M. Boutroux’s study of William James gives in brief form—and with a charm of style and expression possible only for those who work with that delicate instrument of precision, French prose—the views which men of this stamp hold; and be it remembered that, like James, they are thoroughly scientific men, steeped in the teachings of material science, who acknowledge no outside limitation upon them in their search for truth. They have a far keener understanding of the world of matter than has been attained by the purely materialistic scientists, just because, in addition, they also understand that outside of the purely physical lies the psychic, and that the realm of religion stands outside even of the purely psychic. M. Boutroux’s book on “Science and Religion” has been translated into English—and we owe a real debt of gratitude to Messrs. Nield and Mitchell for their excellent translations of MM. Boutroux and Bergson. There is much talk of the conflict between science and religion. The inherent absurdity of such talk has never been better expressed than by M. Boutroux when he says that such opposition “is the result of our defining both science and religion in an artificial manner by, on the one hand, identifying science with physical science, and, on the other hand, assuming that religion consists in the dogmas which merely symbolize it.” M. Boutroux’s book, like M. Bergson’s “Creative Evolution,” must be read in its entirety; mere extracts and condensations can not show the profound philosophical acumen with which these men go to the heart of things, and prove that science itself, if correctly understood, renders absurd the harsh and futile dogmatism of many of those who pride themselves upon being, above all things, scientific. For, as these writers point out, the work of the scientist is conditioned upon the existence of the free determination of a spirit which, dominating the scientific spirit, believes also in an æsthetic and moral ideal. They see the material, the physical body, in its relation to other physical bodies; and back of and beyond the physical they see life itself, consciousness, which is to be conceived of as something always dynamic and never static, as a “stream of consciousness,” a “becoming.”

As M. Boutroux finely says, religion gives to the individual his value and treats him as an end in himself, no less than treating him from the standpoint of his duties to other individuals. This philosophy is founded on a wide and sympathetic understanding of the facts of the material world, a frank acceptance of evolution and of all else that modern science has ever taught; and so those who profess it are in a position of impregnable strength when they point out that all this in no shape or way interferes with religion and with Christianity, because, as they hold, evolution in religion has merely tended to disengage it from its own gross and material wrapping, and to leave unfettered the spirit which is its essence. To them Christianity, the greatest of the religious creations which humanity has seen, rests upon what Christ himself teaches; for, as M. Boutroux phrases it, the performance of duty is faith in action, faith in its highest expression, for duty gives no other reason, and need give no other reason, for its existence than “its own incorruptible disinterestedness.” The idea thus expressed is at bottom based on the same truth to which expression is given by Mr. Taylor when he says: “The love of God means not despising but honoring self; and for Christians on earth the true love of God must show itself in doing earth’s duties and living out earth’s full life, and not in abandoning all for dreams, though the dreams be of heaven.” To men such as William James and these two French philosophers physical science, if properly studied, shows conclusively its own limitations, shows conclusively that beyond the material world lies a vast series of phenomena which all material knowledge is powerless to explain, so that science itself teaches that outside of materialism lie the forces of a wholly different world, a world ordered by religion—religion which, says M. Boutroux, must, if loyal to itself, work according to its own nature as a spiritual activity, striving to transform men from within and not from without, by persuasion, by example, by love, by prayer, by the communion of souls, not by restraint or policy; and such a religion has nothing to fear from the progress of science, for the spirit to which it is loyal is the faith in duty, the search for what is for the universal good and for the universal love, the secret springs of all high and beneficent activity.

It is striking to see how these two gifted Frenchmen, by their own road, reach substantially the same conclusion which, by a wholly different method, and indeed in treating religion from a wholly different standpoint, is also reached by the president of Bowdoin College. Mr. Hyde’s short volume combines in high degree a lofty nobility of ethical concept with the most practical and straightforward common-sense treatment of the ways in which this concept should be realized in practice. Each of us must prescribe for himself in these matters, and one man’s need will not be wholly met by what does meet another’s; personally, this book of President Hyde’s gives me something that no other book does, and means to me very, very much.

We must all strive to keep as our most precious heritage the liberty each to worship his God as to him seems best, and, as part of this liberty, freely either to exercise it or to surrender it, in a greater or less degree, each according to his own beliefs and convictions, without infringing on the beliefs and convictions of others. But the professors of the varying creeds, the men who rely upon authority, and those who in different measures profess the theory of individual liberty, can and must work together, with mutual respect and with self-respect, for certain principles which lie deep at the base of every healthy social system. As Bishop Brent says: “The only setting for any one part of the truth is all the rest of the truth. The only relationship big enough for any one man is all the rest of mankind.” Abbot Charles, of Saint Leo Abbey, in Florida, has recently put the case for friendly agreement among good men of varying views, when he summed up a notably fine address in defence—as he truly says, friendly defence—of his own church by enunciating the plea for “true peace founded on justice,” worked out in accordance with what he properly calls one of the “dearest blessings that heaven can give, the spirit that springs from religious liberty.” However widely many earnest and high-minded men of science and many earnest and high-minded men of religious convictions may from one side or the other disagree with the teachings of the earnest and high-minded students of philosophy whom I have quoted, yet surely we can all be in agreement with the fundamentals on which their philosophy is based. Surely we must all recognize the search for truth as an imperative duty; and we ought all of us likewise to recognize that this search for truth should be carried on, not only fearlessly, but also with reverence, with humility of spirit, and with full recognition of our own limitations both of the mind and the soul. We must stand equally against tyranny and against irreverence in all things of the spirit, with the firm conviction that we can all work together for a higher social and individual life if only, whatever form of creed we profess, we make the doing of duty and the love of our fellow men two of the prime articles in our universal faith. To those who deny the ethical obligation implied in such a faith we who acknowledge the obligation are aliens; and we are brothers to all those who do acknowledge it, whatever their creed or system of philosophy.

THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS

THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS

Next to developing original writers in its own time, the most fortunate thing, from the literary standpoint, which can befall any people is to have revealed to it some new treasure-house of literature. This treasure-house may be stored with the writings of another people in the present, or else with the writings of a buried past. But a few generations ago, in that innocent age when Blackstone could speak of the “Goths, Huns, Franks, and Vandals”—incongruous gathering—as “Celtic” tribes, the long-vanished literatures of the ancestors of the present European nations, the epics, the sagas, the stories in verse or prose, were hardly known to, or regarded by, their educated and cultivated descendants. Gradually, and chiefly in the nineteenth century, these forgotten literatures, or fragments of them, were one by one recovered. They are various in merit and interest, in antiquity and extent—“Beowulf,” the Norse sagas, the “Kalevala,” the “Nibelungenlied,” the “Song of Roland,” the Arthurian cycle of romances. In some there is but one great poem; in some all the poems or stories are of one type; in others, as in the case of the Norse sagas, a wide range of history, myth, and personal biography is covered. In our own day there has at last come about a popular revival of interest in the wealth of poems and tales to be found in the ancient Celtic, and especially in the ancient Erse, manuscripts—the whole forming a body of prose and poetry of great and well-nigh unique interest from every standpoint, which in some respects can be matched only by the Norse sagas, and which has some striking beauties the like of which are not to be found even in these Norse sagas.

For many decades German, French, Irish, and English students have worked over the ancient Celtic texts, and recently many of the more striking and more beautiful stories have been reproduced or paraphrased in popular form by writers like Lady Gregory and Miss Hull, Lady Gregory showing in her prose something of the charm which her countrywoman Emily Lawless shows in her poems “With the Wild Geese.” It is greatly to be regretted that America should have done so little either in the way of original study and research in connection with the early Celtic literature, or in the way of popularizing and familiarizing that literature, and it is much to be desired that, wherever possible, chairs of Celtic should be established in our leading universities. Moreover, in addition to the scholar’s work which is especially designed for students, there must ultimately be done the additional work which puts the results of the scholarship at the disposal of the average layman. This has largely been done for the Norse sagas. William Morris has translated the “Heimskringla” into language which, while not exactly English, can nevertheless be understood without difficulty—which is more than can be said for his translation of “Beowulf”—and which has a real, though affectedly archaic, beauty. Dasent has translated the “Younger Edda,” the “Njala Saga,” and the “Saga of Gisli the Outlaw.” It is pleasant for Americans to feel that it was Longfellow who, in his “Saga of King Olaf,” rendered one of the most striking of the old Norse tales into a great poem.

It is difficult to speak with anything like exactness of the relative ages of these primitive literatures. Doubtless in each case the earliest manuscripts that have come down to us are themselves based upon far earlier ones which have been destroyed, and doubtless, when they were first written down, the tales had themselves been recited, and during the course of countless recitations had been changed and added to and built upon, for a period of centuries. Sometimes, as in the “Song of Roland,” we know at least in bare outline the historical incident which for some reason impressed the popular imagination until around it there grew up a great epic, of which the facts have been twisted completely out of shape. In other instances, as in the “Nibelungenlied,” a tale, adaptable in its outlines to many different peoples, was adapted to the geography of a particular people, and to what that people at least thought was history; thus the Rhine becomes the great river of the “Nibelungenlied,” and in the second part of the epic the revenge of Krimhild becomes connected with dim memories of Attila’s vast and evanescent empire. The “Song of Roland” and the “Nibelungenlied” were much later than the earliest English, Norse, and Irish poems. Very roughly, it may perhaps be said that, in the earliest forms at which we can guess, the Irish sagas were produced, or at least were in healthy life, at about the time when “Beowulf” was a live saga, and two or three centuries or thereabouts before the early Norse sagas took a shape which we would recognize as virtually akin to that they now have.

These Celtic sagas are conveniently, though somewhat artificially, arranged in cycles. In some ways the most interesting of these is the Cuchulain cycle, although until very recently it was far less known than the Ossianic cycle—the cycle which tells of the deeds of Finn and the Fianna. The poems which tell of the mighty feats of Cuchulain, and of the heroes whose life-threads were interwoven with his, date back to a purely pagan Ireland—an Ireland cut off from all connection with the splendid and slowly dying civilization of Rome, an Ireland in which still obtained ancient customs that had elsewhere vanished even from the memory of man.

Thus the heroes of the Cuchulain sagas still fought in chariots driven each by a charioteer who was also the stanch friend and retainer of the hero. Now, at one time war chariots had held the first place in the armies of all the powerful empires in the lands adjoining the Mediterranean and stretching eastward beyond the Tigris. Strange African tribes had used them north and south of the Atlas Mountains. When the mighty, conquering kings of Egypt made their forays into Syria, and there encountered the Hittite hosts, the decisive feature in each battle was the shock between the hundreds of chariots arrayed on each side. The tyranny of Sisera rested on his nine hundred chariots of iron. The Homeric heroes were “tamers of horses,” which were not ridden in battle, but driven in the war chariots. That mysterious people, the Etruscans, of whose race and speech we know nothing, originally fought in chariots. But in the period of Greek and Roman splendor the war chariot had already passed away. It had seemingly never been characteristic of the wild Teuton tribes; but among the western Celts it lingered long. Cæsar encountered it among the hostile tribes when he made his famous raid into Britain; and in Ireland it lasted later still.

The customs of the heroes and people of the Erin of Cuchulain’s time were as archaic as the chariots in which they rode to battle. The sagas contain a wealth of material for the historian. They show us a land where the men were herdsmen, tillers of the soil, hunters, bards, seers, but, above all, warriors. Erin was a world to herself. Her people at times encountered the peoples of Britain or of Continental Europe, whether in trade or in piracy; but her chief interest, her overwhelming interest, lay in what went on within her own borders. There was a high king of shadowy power, whose sway was vaguely recognized as extending over the island, but whose practical supremacy was challenged on every hand by whatever king or under-king felt the fierce whim seize him. There were chiefs and serfs; there were halls and fortresses; there were huge herds of horses and cattle and sheep and swine. The kings and queens, the great lords and their wives, the chiefs and the famous fighting men, wore garments crimson and blue and green and saffron, plain or checkered, and plaid and striped. They had rings and clasps and torques of gold and silver, urns and mugs and troughs and vessels of iron and silver. They played chess by the fires in their great halls, and they feasted and drank and quarrelled within them, and the women had sun-parlors of their own.

Among the most striking of the tales are those of the “Fate of the Sons of Usnach,” telling of Deirdrè’s life and love and her lamentation for her slain lover; of the “Wooing of Emer” by Cuchulain; of the “Feast of Bricriu”; and of the famous Cattle-Spoil of Cooley, the most famous romance of ancient Ireland, the story of the great raid for the Dun Bull of Cooley. But there are many others of almost equal interest; such as the story of MacDatho’s pig, with its Gargantuan carouse of the quarrelsome champions; and the tale of the siege of Howth.

In these tales, which in so many points are necessarily like the similar tales that have come down from the immemorial past of the peoples of kindred race, there are also striking peculiarities that hedge them apart. The tales are found in many versions, which for the most part have been enlarged by pedantic scribes of aftertime, who often made them prolix and tedious, and added grotesque and fantastic exaggerations of their own to the barbaric exaggerations already in them, doing much what Saxo Grammaticus did for the Scandinavian tales. They might have been woven into some great epic, or at least have taken far more definite and connected shape, if the history of Ireland had developed along lines similar to those of the other nations of west Europe. But her history was broken by terrible national tragedies and calamities. To the scourge of the vikings succeeded the Anglo-Norman conquest, with all its ruinous effects on the growth of the national life. The early poems of the Erse bards could not develop as those other early lays developed which afterward became the romances of Arthur and Roland and Siegfried. They remain primitive, as “Beowulf” is primitive, as, in less measure, “Gisli the Outlaw” is primitive.

The heroes are much like those of the early folk of kindred stock everywhere. They are huge, splendid barbarians, sometimes yellow-haired, sometimes black- or brown-haired, and their chief title to glory is found in their feats of bodily prowess. Among the feats often enumerated or referred to are the ability to leap like a salmon, to run like a stag, to hurl great rocks incredible distances, to toss the wheel, and, like the Norse berserkers, when possessed with the fury of battle, to grow demoniac with fearsome rage. This last feat was especially valued, and was recognized as the “heroes’ fury.” As with most primitive peoples, the power to shout loudly was much prized, and had a distinct place of respect, under the title of “mad roar,” in any list of a given hero’s exhibitions of strength or agility; just as Stentor’s voice was regarded by his comrades as a valuable military asset. So, when the slaughter begins in Etzel’s hall, the writer of the Nibelung lay dwells with admiration on the vast strength of Diederick, as shown by the way in which his voice rang like a bison horn, resounding within and without the walls. Many of the feats chronicled of the early Erse heroes are now wholly unintelligible to us; we can not even be sure what they were, still less why they should have been admired.

Among the heroes stood the men of wisdom, as wisdom was in the early world, a vulpine wisdom of craft and cunning and treachery and double-dealing. Druids, warlocks, sorcerers, magicians, witches appear, now as friends, now as unfriends, of the men of might. Fiercely the heroes fought and wide they wandered; yet their fights and their wanderings were not very different from those that we read about in many other primitive tales. There is the usual incredible variety of incidents and character, and, together with the variety, an endless repetition. But these Erse tales differ markedly from the early Norse and Teutonic stories in more than one particular. A vein of the supernatural and a vein of the romantic run through them and relieve their grimness and harshness in a way very different from anything to be found in the Teutonic. Of course the supernatural element often takes as grim a form in early Irish as in early Norse or German; the Goddess with red eyebrows who on stricken fields wooed the Erse heroes from life did not differ essentially from the Valkyrie; and there were land and water demons in Ireland as terrible as those against which Beowulf warred. But, in addition, there is in the Irish tales an unearthliness free from all that is monstrous and horrible; and their unearthly creatures could become in aftertime the fairies of the moonlight and the greenwood, so different from the trolls and gnomes and misshapen giants bequeathed to later generations by the Norse mythology.

Still more striking is the difference between the women in the Irish sagas and those, for instance, of the Norse sagas. Their heirs of the spirit are the Arthurian heroines, and the heroines of the romances of the Middle Ages. In the “Song of Roland”—rather curiously, considering that it is the first great piece of French literature—woman plays absolutely no part at all; there is not a female figure which is more than a name, or which can be placed beside Roland and Oliver, Archbishop Turpin and the traitor Ganelon, and Charlemagne, the mighty emperor of the “barbe fleurie.” The heroines of the early Norse and German stories are splendid and terrible, fit to be the mothers of a mighty race, as stern and relentless as their lovers and husbands. But it would be hard indeed to find among them a heroine who would appeal to our modern ideas as does Emer, the beloved of Cuchulain, or Dierdrè, the sweetheart of the fated son of Usnach. Emer and Deirdrè have the charm, the power of inspiring and returning romantic love, that belonged to the ladies whose lords were the knights of the Round Table, though of course this does not mean that they lacked some very archaic tastes and attributes.

Emer, the daughter of Forgall the Wily, who was wooed by Cuchulain, had the “six gifts of a girl”—beauty, and a soft voice, and sweet speech, and wisdom, and needlework, and chastity. In their wooing the hero and heroine spoke to one another in riddles, those delights of the childhood of peoples. She set him journeys to go and feats to perform, which he did in the manner of later knight errants. After long courting and many hardships, he took Emer to wife, and she was true to him and loved him and gloried in him and watched over him until the day he went out to meet his death. All this was in a spirit which we would find natural in a heroine of modern or of mediæval times—a spirit which it would be hard to match either among the civilizations of antiquity, or in early barbarisms other than the Erse.

So it was with Deirdrè, the beautiful girl who forsook her betrothed, the Over-King of Ulster, for the love of Naisi, and fled with him and his two brothers across the waters to Scotland. At last they returned to Ireland, and there Deirdrè’s lover and his two brothers were slain by the treachery of the king whose guests they were. Many versions of the Songs of Deirdrè have come down to us, of her farewell to Alba and her lament over her slain lover; for during centuries this tragedy of Deirdrè, together with the tragical fate of the Children of Lir and the tragical fate of the Children of Tuirenn, were known as the “Three Sorrowful Tales of Erin.” None has better retained its vitality down to the present day. Even to us, reading the songs in an alien age and tongue, they are very beautiful. Deirdrè sings wistfully of her Scottish abiding-place, with its pleasant, cuckoo-haunted groves, and its cliffs, and the white sand on the beaches. She tells of her lover’s single infidelity, when he came enamoured of the daughter of a Scottish lord, and Deirdrè, broken-hearted, put off to sea in a boat, indifferent whether she should live or die; whereupon the two brothers of her lover swam after her and brought her back, to find him very repentant and swearing a threefold oath that never again would he prove false to her until he should go to the hosts of the dead. She dwells constantly on the unfailing tenderness of the three heroes; for her lover’s two brothers cared for her as he did:

“Much hardship would I take,
Along with the three heroes;
I would endure without house, without fire,
It is not I that would be gloomy.

“Their three shields and their spears

Were often a bed for me.

Put their three hard swords

Over the grave, O young man!”

For the most part, in her songs, Deirdrè dwells on the glories and beauties of the three warriors, the three dragons, the three champions of the Red Branch, the three that used to break every onrush, the three hawks, the three darlings of the women of Erin, the three heroes who were not good at homage. She sings of their splendor in the foray, of their nobleness as they returned to their home, to bring fagots for the fire, to bear in an ox or a boar for the table; sweet though the pipes and flutes and horns were in the house of the king, sweeter yet was it to hearken to the songs sung by the sons of Usnach, for “like the sound of the wave was the voice of Naisi.”

There were other Irish heroines of a more common barbarian type. Such was the famous warrior-queen, Meave, tall and beautiful, with her white face and yellow hair, terrible in her battle chariot when she drove at full speed into the press of fighting men, and “fought over the ears of the horses.” Her virtues were those of a warlike barbarian king, and she claimed the like large liberty in morals. Her husband was Ailill, the Connaught king, and, as Meave carefully explained to him in what the old Erse bards called a “bolster conversation,” their marriage was literally a partnership wherein she demanded from her husband an exact equality of treatment according to her own views and on her own terms; the three essential qualities upon which she insisted being that he should be brave, generous, and completely devoid of jealousy!

Fair-haired Queen Meave was a myth, a goddess, and her memory changed and dwindled until at last she reappeared as Queen Mab of fairyland. But among the ancient Celts her likeness was the likeness of many a historic warrior queen. The descriptions given of her by the first writers or compilers of the famous romances of the foray for the Dun Bull of Cooley almost exactly match the descriptions given by the Latin historian of the British Queen Boadicea, tall and terrible-faced, her long, yellow hair flowing to her hips, spear in hand, golden collar on neck, her brightly colored mantle fastened across her breast with a brooch.

Not only were some of Meave’s deeds of a rather startling kind, but even Emer and Deirdrè at times showed traits that to a modern reader may seem out of place, in view of what has been said of them above. But we must remember the surroundings, and think of what even the real women of history were, throughout European lands, until a far later period. In the “Heimskringla” we read of Queen Sigrid, the wisest of women, who grew tired of the small kings who came to ask her hand, a request which she did not regard them as warranted to make either by position or extent of dominion. So one day when two kings had thus come to woo her, she lodged them in a separate wooden house, with all their company, and feasted them until they were all very drunk, and fell asleep; then in the middle of the night she had her men fall on them with fire and sword, burn those who stayed within the hall and slay those who broke out. The incident is mentioned in the saga without the slightest condemnation; on the contrary, it evidently placed the queen on a higher social level than before, for, in concluding the account, the saga mentions that Sigrid said “that she would weary these small kings of coming from other lands to woo her; so she was called Sigrid Haughty thereafter.” Now, Sigrid was an historical character who lived many hundred years after the time of Emer and Deirdrè and Meave, and the simplicity with which her deed was chronicled at the time, and regarded afterward, should reconcile us to some of the feats recorded of those shadowy Erse predecessors of hers, who were separated from her by an interval of time as great as that which separates her from us.

The story of the “Feast of Bricriu of the Bitter Tongue” is one of the most interesting of the tales of the Cuchulain cycle. In all this cycle of tales, Bricriu appears as the cunning, malevolent mischief-maker, dreaded for his biting satire and his power of setting by the ears the boastful, truculent, reckless, and marvellously short-tempered heroes among whom he lived. He has points of resemblance to Thersites, to Sir Kay, of the Arthurian romances, and to Conan, of the Ossianic cycle of Celtic sagas. This story is based upon the custom of the “champion’s portion,” which at a feast was allotted to the bravest man. It was a custom which lasted far down into historic times, and was recognized in the Brehon laws, where a heavy fine was imposed upon any person who stole it from the one to whom it belonged. The story in its present form, like all of these stories, is doubtless somewhat changed from the story as it was originally recited among the pre-Christian Celts of Ireland, but it still commemorates customs of the most primitive kind, many of them akin to those of all the races of Aryan tongue in their earlier days. The queens cause their maids to heat water for the warriors’ baths when they return from war, and similarly made ready to greet their guests, as did the Homeric heroines. The feasts were Homeric feasts. The heroes boasted and sulked and fought as did the Greeks before Troy. At their feasts, when the pork and beef, the wheaten cakes and honey, had been eaten, and the beer, and sometimes the wine of Gaul, had been drunk in huge quantities, the heroes, vainglorious and quarrelsome, were always apt to fight. Thus in the three houses which together made up the palace of the high king at Emain Macha, it was necessary that the arms of the heroes should all be kept in one place, so that they could not attack one another at the feasts. These three houses of the palace were the Royal House, in which the high king himself had his bronzed and jewelled room; the Speckled House, where the swords, the shields, and the spears of the heroes were kept; and the House of the Red Branch, where not only the weapons, but the heads of the beaten enemies were stored; and it was in connection with this last grewsome house that the heroes in the train of the High King Conchubar took their name of the “Heroes of the Red Branch.”

When Bricriu gave his feast, he prepared for it by building a spacious house even handsomer than the House of the Red Branch; and it is described in great detail, as fashioned after “Tara’s Mead Hall,” and of great strength and magnificence; and it was stocked with quilts and blankets and beds and pillows, as well as with abundance of meat and drink. Then he invited the high king and all the nobles of Ulster to come to the feast. An amusing touch in the saga is the frank consternation of the heroes who were thus asked. They felt themselves helpless before the wiles of Bricriu, and at first refused outright to go, because they were sure that he would contrive to set them to fighting with one another; and they went at all only after they had taken hostages from Bricriu and had arranged that he should himself leave the feast-hall as soon as the feast was spread. But their precautions were in vain, and Bricriu had no trouble in bringing about a furious dispute among the three leading chiefs, Loigaire the Triumphant, Conall the Victorious, and Cuchulain. He promised to each the champion’s portion, on condition that each should claim it. Nor did he rest here, but produced what the saga calls “the war of words of the women of Ulster,” by persuading the three wives of the three heroes that each should tread first into the banquet-hall. Each of the ladies, in whose minds he thus raised visions of social precedence, had walked away from the palace with half a hundred women in her train, when they all three met. The saga describes how they started to return to the hall together, walking evenly, gracefully, and easily at first, and then with quicker steps, until, when they got near the house, they raised their robes “to the round of the leg” and ran at full speed. When they got to the hall the doors were shut, and, as they stood outside, each wife chanted her own perfections, but, above all, the valor and ferocious prowess of her husband, scolding one another as did Brunhild and Krimhild in the quarrel that led to Siegfried’s death at the hands of Hagen. Each husband, as in duty bound, helped his wife into the hall, and the bickering which had already taken place about the champion’s portion was renewed. At last it was settled that the three rivals should drive in their chariots to the home of Ailill and Meave, who should adjudge between them; and the judgment given, after testing their prowess in many ways, and especially in encounters with demons and goblins, was finally in favor of Cuchulain.

One of the striking parts of the tale is that in which the three champions, following one another, arrive at the palace of Meave. The daughter of Meave goes to the sun-parlor over the high porch of the hold, and from there she is told by the queen to describe in turn each chariot and the color of the horses and how the hero looks and how the chariot courses. The girl obeys, and describes in detail each chariot as it comes up, and the queen in each case recognizes the champion from the description and speaks words of savage praise of each in turn. Loigaire, a fair man, driving two fiery dapple-grays, in a wickerwork chariot with silver-mounted yoke, is chanted by the queen as:

“A fury of war, a fire of judgment,
A flame of vengeance; in mien a hero,
In face a champion, in heart a dragon;

The long knife of proud victories which will hew us to pieces,

The all-noble, red-handed Loigaire.”

Conall is described as driving a roan and a bay, in a chariot with two bright wheels of bronze, he himself fair, in face white and red, his mantle blue and crimson, and Meave describes him as:

“A wolf among cattle; battle on battle,

Exploit on exploit, head upon head he heaps”;

and says that if he is excited to rage he will cut up her people

“As a trout on red sandstone is cut.”

Then Cuchulain is described, driving at a gallop a dapple-gray and a dark-gray, in a chariot with iron wheels and a bright silver pole. The hero himself is a dark, melancholy man, the comeliest of the men of Erin, in a crimson tunic, with gold-hilted sword, a blood-red spear, and over his shoulders a crimson shield rimmed with silver and gold. Meave, on hearing the description, chants the hero as:

“An ocean in fury, a whale that rageth, a fragment of flame and fire;

A bear majestic, a grandly moving billow,

A beast in maddening ire:

In the crash of glorious battle through the hostile foe he leaps,

His shout the fury of doom;

A terrible bear, he is death to the herd of cattle,

Feat upon feat, head upon head he heaps:

Laud ye the hearty one, he who is victor fully.”

Bricriu lost his life as a sequel of the great raid for the Dun Bull of Cooley. This was undertaken by Queen Meave as the result of the “bolster conversation,” the curtain quarrel, between her and Ailill as to which of the two, husband or wife, had the more treasure. To settle the dispute, they compared their respective treasures, beginning with their wooden and iron vessels, going on with their rings and bracelets and brooches and fine clothes, and ending with their flocks of sheep, and herds of swine, horses, and cattle. The tally was even for both sides until they came to the cattle, when it appeared that Ailill had a huge, white-horned bull with which there was nothing of Meave’s to compare. The chagrined queen learned from a herald that in Cooley there was a dun or brown bull which, it was asserted, was even larger and more formidable.

Meave announces that by fair means or foul the dun bull shall be hers, and she raises her hosts. A great war ensues, in which Cuchulain distinguishes himself above all others. All the heroes gather to the fight, and a special canto is devoted to the fate of a very old man, Iliach, a chief of Ulster, who resolves to attack the foe and avenge Ulster’s honor on them. “Whether, then, I fall or come out of it, is all one,” he said. The saga tells how his withered and wasted old horses, which fed on the shore by his little fort, were harnessed to the ancient chariot, which had long lost its cushions. Into it he got, mother-naked, with his sword and his pair of blunt, rusty spears, and great throwing-stones heaped at his feet; and thus he attacked the hosts of Meave and fought till his death. In the Cuchulain sagas the heroes frequently fight with stones; and the practice obtained until much later days, for in Olaf’s death-battle with the ships of Hakon his men were cleared from the decks of the Long Serpent by dexterously hurled stones as well as by spears.

Partly by cunning, Meave gets the dun bull upon which she had set her heart. Then comes in a thoroughly Erse touch. It appears that the two bulls have lived many lives in different forms, and always in hostility to each other, since the days when their souls were the souls of two swineherds, who quarrelled and fought to the death. Now the two great bulls renew their ancient fight. Bricriu is forced out to witness it, and is trampled to death by the beasts. At last the white-homed bull is slain, and the dun, raging and destroying, goes back to his home, where he too dies. And this, says the saga, in ending, is the tale of the Dun Bull of Cooley and the Driving of the Cattle-Herd by Meave and Ailill, and their war with Ulster.

The Erse tales have suffered from many causes. Taken as a mass, they did not develop as the sagas and the epics of certain other nations developed; but they possess extraordinary variety and beauty, and in their mysticism, their devotion to and appreciation of natural beauty, their exaltation of the glorious courage of men and of the charm and devotion of women, in all the touches that tell of a long-vanished life, they possess a curious attraction of their own. They deserve the research which can be given only by the lifelong effort of trained scholars; they should be studied for their poetry, as countless scholars have studied those early literatures; moreover, they should be studied as Victor Bérard has studied the “Odyssey,” for reasons apart from their poetical worth; and finally they deserve to be translated and adapted so as to become a familiar household part of that literature which all the English-speaking peoples possess in common.

AN ART EXHIBITION

AN ART EXHIBITION

The recent “International Exhibition of Modern Art” in New York was really noteworthy. Messrs. Davies, Kuhn, Gregg, and their fellow members of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors did a work of very real value in securing such an exhibition of the works of both foreign and native painters and sculptors. Primarily their purpose was to give the public a chance to see what has recently been going on abroad. No similar collection of the works of European “moderns” has ever been exhibited in this country. The exhibitors were quite right as to the need of showing to our people in this manner the art forces which of late have been at work in Europe, forces which can not be ignored.

This does not mean that I in the least accept the view that these men take of the European extremists whose pictures were here exhibited. It is true, as the champions of these extremists say, that there can be no life without change, no development without change, and that to be afraid of what is different or unfamiliar is to be afraid of life. It is no less true, however, that change may mean death and not life, and retrogression instead of development. Probably we err in treating most of these pictures seriously. It is likely that many of them represent in the painters the astute appreciation of the power to make folly lucrative which the late P. T. Barnum showed with his faked mermaid. There are thousands of people who will pay small sums to look at a faked mermaid; and now and then one of this kind with enough money will buy a Cubist picture, or a picture of a misshapen nude woman, repellent from every standpoint.

In some ways it is the work of the American painters and sculptors which is of most interest in this collection, and a glance at this work must convince any one of the real good that is coming out of the new movements, fantastic though many of the developments of these new movements are. There was one note entirely absent from the exhibition, and that was the note of the commonplace. There was not a touch of simpering, self-satisfied conventionality anywhere in the exhibition. Any sculptor or painter who had in him something to express and the power of expressing it found the field open to him. He did not have to be afraid because his work was not along ordinary lines. There was no stunting or dwarfing, no requirement that a man whose gift lay in new directions should measure up or down to stereotyped and fossilized standards.

For all of this there can be only hearty praise. But this does not in the least mean that the extremists whose paintings and pictures were represented are entitled to any praise, save, perhaps, that they have helped to break fetters. Probably in any reform movement, any progressive movement, in any field of life, the penalty for avoiding the commonplace is a liability to extravagance. It is vitally necessary to move forward and to shake off the dead hand, often the fossilized dead hand, of the reactionaries; and yet we have to face the fact that there is apt to be a lunatic fringe among the votaries of any forward movement. In this recent art exhibition the lunatic fringe was fully in evidence, especially in the rooms devoted to the Cubists and the Futurists, or Near-Impressionists. I am not entirely certain which of the two latter terms should be used in connection with some of the various pictures and representations of plastic art—and, frankly, it is not of the least consequence. The Cubists are entitled to the serious attention of all who find enjoyment in the colored puzzle-pictures of the Sunday newspapers. Of course there is no reason for choosing the cube as a symbol, except that it is probably less fitted than any other mathematical expression for any but the most formal decorative art. There is no reason why people should not call themselves Cubists, or Octagonists, or Parallelopipedonists, or Knights of the Isosceles Triangle, or Brothers of the Cosine, if they so desire; as expressing anything serious and permanent, one term is as fatuous as another. Take the picture which for some reason is called “A Naked Man Going Down Stairs.” There is in my bathroom a really good Navajo rug which, on any proper interpretation of the Cubist theory, is a far more satisfactory and decorative picture. Now, if, for some inscrutable reason, it suited somebody to call this rug a picture of, say, “A Well-Dressed Man Going Up a Ladder,” the name would fit the facts just about as well as in the case of the Cubist picture of the “Naked Man Going Down Stairs.” From the standpoint of terminology each name would have whatever merit inheres in a rather cheap straining after effect; and from the standpoint of decorative value, of sincerity, and of artistic merit, the Navajo rug is infinitely ahead of the picture.

As for many of the human figures in the pictures of the Futurists, they show that the school would be better entitled to the name of the “Past-ists.” I was interested to find that a man of scientific attainments who had likewise looked at the pictures had been struck, as I was, by their resemblance to the later work of the palæolithic artists of the French and Spanish caves. There are interesting samples of the strivings for the representation of the human form among artists of many different countries and times, all in the same stage of palæolithic culture, to be found in a recent number of the “Revue d’Ethnographie.” The palæolithic artist was able to portray the bison, the mammoth, the reindeer, and the horse with spirit and success, while he still stumbled painfully in the effort to portray man. This stumbling effort in his case represented progress, and he was entitled to great credit for it. Forty thousand years later, when entered into artificially and deliberately, it represents only a smirking pose of retrogression, and is not praiseworthy. So with much of the sculpture. A family group of precisely the merit that inheres in a structure made of the wooden blocks in a nursery is not entitled to be reproduced in marble. Admirers speak of the kneeling female figure by Lehmbruck—I use “female” advisedly, for although obviously mammalian it is not especially human—as “full of lyric grace,” as “tremendously sincere,” and “of a jewel-like preciousness.” I am not competent to say whether these words themselves represent sincerity or merely a conventional jargon; it is just as easy to be conventional about the fantastic as about the commonplace. In any event one might as well speak of the “lyric grace” of a praying mantis, which adopts much the same attitude; and why a deformed pelvis should be called “sincere,” or a tibia of giraffe-like length “precious,” seems to a reasonably sane view of the pictures of Matisse a question of pathological rather than artistic significance. This figure and the absurd portrait head of some young lady have the merit that inheres in extravagant caricature. It is a merit, but it is not a high merit. It entitles these pieces to stand in sculpture where nonsense rhymes stand in literature and the sketches of Aubrey Beardsley in pictorial art. These modern sculptured caricatures in no way approach the gargoyles of Gothic cathedrals, probably because the modern artists are too self-conscious and make themselves ridiculous by pretentiousness. The makers of the gargoyles knew very well that the gargoyles did not represent what was most important in the Gothic cathedrals. They stood for just a little point of grotesque reaction against, and relief from, the tremendous elemental vastness and grandeur of the Houses of God. They were imps, sinister and comic, grim and yet futile, and they fitted admirably into the framework of the theology that found its expression in the towering and wonderful piles which they ornamented.

Very little of the work of the extremists among the European “moderns” seems to be good in and for itself; nevertheless it has certainly helped any number of American artists to do work that is original and serious; and this not only in painting but in sculpture. I wish the exhibition had contained some of the work of the late Marcius Symonds; very few people knew or cared for it while he lived; but not since Turner has there been another man on whose canvas glowed so much of that unearthly “light that never was on land or sea.” But the exhibition contained so much of extraordinary merit that it is ungrateful even to mention an omission. To name the pictures one would like to possess—and the bronzes and tanagras and plasters—would mean to make a catalogue of indefinite length. One of the most striking pictures was the “Terminal Yards”—the seeing eye was there, and the cunning hand. I should like to mention all the pictures of the president of the association, Arthur B. Davies. As first-class decorative work of an entirely new type, the very unexpected pictures of Sheriff Bob Chandler have a merit all their own. The “Arizona Desert,” the “Canadian Night,” the group of girls on the roof of a New York tenement-house, the studies in the Bronx Zoo, the “Heracles,” the studies for the Utah monument, the little group called “Gossip,” which has something of the quality of the famous fifteenth idyl of Theocritus, the “Pelf,” with its grim suggestiveness—these and a hundred others are worthy of study, each of them; I am naming at random those which at the moment I happen to recall. I am not speaking of the acknowledged masters, of Whistler, Puvis de Chavannes, Monet; nor of John’s children; nor of Cézanne’s old woman with a rosary; nor of Redon’s marvellous color-pieces—a worthy critic should speak of these. All I am trying to do is to point out why a layman is grateful to those who arranged this exhibition.

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

The illustration near the front of the book is the publisher’s logo.

Page 219: “understanded” was printed that way.

Page 287: “knight errants” was printed that way.

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Table of Contents

- HISTORY AS LITERATURE AND OTHER ESSAYS
- PREFACE
- CONTENTS
- HISTORY AS LITERATURE
- HISTORY AS LITERATURE
- BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES IN HISTORY
- BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES IN HISTORY
- THE WORLD MOVEMENT
- THE WORLD MOVEMENT
- CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC
- CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC
- THE THRALDOM OF NAMES
- THE THRALDOM OF NAMES
- PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP
- PRODUCTIVE SCHOLARSHIP
- DANTE AND THE BOWERY
- DANTE AND THE BOWERY
- THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
- THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
- THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN A REVERENT SPIRIT
- THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN A REVERENT SPIRIT
- THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS
- THE ANCIENT IRISH SAGAS
- AN ART EXHIBITION
- AN ART EXHIBITION
- Transcriber’s Notes
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE